Voice of Eve ANNIVERSARY AUGUST 15, 2019
Contents Abigail Michelini 4 Amy Soricelli 8 Ann Christine Tabaka 12 Ayse Teksen 18 CLS Ferguson 24 Elena Lelia Radulescu 30 Gabriela Penelope Carolus 34 Jade Homa 38 Josslyn Turner 44 Karen Horsley 50 Karen Pierce Gonzalez 54
Laura Ingram 60 Lauren Scharhag 66 Linda M. Crate 72 Maggie Burton 76 Mary K O’Melveny 82 Margaret Koger 86 Martha Clarkson 90 Rachel Essaf Maher 96 Windflower 100 Yong Takahashi 106
ABIGAIL M
MICHELINI
Becoming a Mother
ABIGAIL MICHELINI
The first I saw you part limb from tree mouth filled with splinters eyes all mystery You wore flesh red the color of my mother inside and I lost your ribs leaked Y chromosomes became woman again became born alone it was all cliche and I thought I’d feel worthy whole, patient, and kind not viscerally less yours not dance because I’m my own
About Abigail Michelini
Abigail Michelini lives with her husband and son in southern California, where her greatest joys include teaching and writing poetry. Her work can be found in The Best Emerging Poets Series, Topic Journal, and The Anthology of Appalachian Writers, among other publications.
AMY SOR
RICELLI
When Zoe Doesn’t Know Her Mom Is Dying
AMY SORICELLI
There is nothing new to dying. The faces of those who watch are the same, the eyes are the same, the mouth; it’s all the same. There is no surprise to the things we ask of one another - or the simple task of washing your hands, turning the sound on louder.. That still happens and all the birds still fly, you still collect your mail. Someone will bite their lip. You will ask how they can manage to, later, when it’s over. You will wonder, to yourself, how the whole world just carries on their small talk, their coffee sipped, those wandering pennies in their bag. How can the regular things still happen when your soul is lost in this black space so wide, Wider than wide. When you’ve lost your soul. The children will wait for you at the foot of your bed and they will sing the silly tunes from yesterday’s carpet cartoon. But you will be okay with that, as you have taught them much, much more. You have taught them everything.
About Amy Soricelli
Amy Soricelli has been in the field of career education and staffing for over 30 years. A lifelong Bronx resident, she has been published in Grub Street, Camelsaloon, Versewrights, The Starving Artist, Picayune Press, Deadsnakes, Corvus review, Deadbeats, Cantos, Poetrybay, The Blue Hour Magazine, Empty Mirror, Turbulence magazine, Bloodsugar Poetry, Little Rose magazine, The Caper Journal, CrossBronx, Long Island Quarterly, Blind Vigil Review, Isacoustic, Poetry Pacific, Underfoot, Picaroon Poetry, Vita Brevis, as well as several anthologies. Nominated for Sundress Publications “the best of the net” award 6/13, and recipient of Grace A. Croff Memorial Award for Poetry, Herbert H. Lehman College, 1975.
ANN CHRIST
TINE TABAKA
Living Water
ANN CHRISTINE TABAKA
Water … Cool, refreshing, life sustaining. Absent, all breath perishes. The river that flows down to the sea is born in the mountains high. A marriage of snow-melt and rain, an ancient love story of myth. Trickling, sparkling, growing, pregnant with life, a union for all ages. Moisture laden clouds bestow their gift upon the earth. All that is living sing praise to waters from above. Enduring journey over rocks and pain, continuing to the sandy shores of time. Reflecting all that was before and all there is to be. Rain … a soothing, melodic patter, or a devastating downpour. Both blessing and bane. Yet we cannot live without it. Water … A reminder of where we came from, and where we are to end. Prismed droplets, a rainbow’s tribute upon the thirsty earth.
Street Corner
ANN CHRISTINE TABAKA
Alligator skin and button eyes. The devil himself would cry at seeing such a man. Twisted hand held out in despair, begging for a pittance. Gaping wound of hunger weeps out injustice spent for a dime. Cardboard castle and newspaper bed against a bitter cold blast of truth. Breath held tight in defiance to a storm of unrepented sins. Again, and yet again I say, but for the grace …. Time turning orange to brown, fingers aching blue. Discarded man, hunched figure, a pile of rags upon the sidewalk. Head bowed low, not in contrition. Empty shell with hollow stare. Words of ice melted by the fire of unforgiving masses. No one sees, no one cares. A procession of woe slowly spirals ever downward into a whirlpool of the damned. Tear stained vision of impassioned pain, forever cursed to walk this earth alone, calling street corner home. But for the grace …
About Ann Christine Tabaka
Ann Christine Tabaka was nominated for the 2017 Pushcart Prize in Poetry publications. She lives in Delaware, USA. She loves gardening and cooking Ethos Literary Journal, North of Oxford, Pomona Valley Review, Page & Spine, W Chaos, Pangolin Review, Foliate Oak Review, Better Than Starbucks!, The Write
y, has been internationally published, and won poetry awards from numerous g. Chris lives with her husband and three cats. Her most recent credits are: West Texas Literary Review, The Hungry Chimera, Sheila-Na-Gig, Synchronized Launch, The Stray Branch, The McKinley Review, Fourth & Sycamore.
AYSE T
TEKSEN
Most Nights
AYSE TEKSEN
Most nights I feel lonely even when I’m not feeling guilty over a pleasure forbidden to me. But it’s the hardest when words flow over me and pour onto me. I’m not young anymore, and yet I still can’t figure out how to control them or to direct them toward happy places, bright futures, and hopeful sentences. Would it be a sin now to confess that most of the time I hate writing poems onto sheets and blank white pieces of screens at home, at work, at bus stops, and subway stations? I’m afraid I’m not afraid of admitting I cried— no, I wailed—
at METU subway station this evening on my way home as if I had one. No home, no shelter, only lack of dignity floating about me and hovering loudly to get my attention because at times I try— I try to forget to forgive and to let things and small miracles happen and to live sensitively and sensibly. But no, it doesn’t happen; life does not happen. It awaits a miraculous call from above to visit me and take my hand. The address is given and noted down wrong, and the message half delivered. One day I hope the message and the whispers will be heard better, and prayers answered, and then I will get to and die at my happy place, having met and lived a life.
About Ayse Teksen
Ayşe Tekşen lives in Ankara, Turkey where she works as a research assista University. Her work has been included in Gravel, After the Pause, The Write L Neologism Poetry Journal, Anapest, Red Weather, Ohio Edit, SWWIM Every Day, T Jaffat El Aqlam, Brickplight, Willow, Fearsome Critters, Susan, The Broke Bohemia has also appeared or is forthcoming in Straylight, Lavender Review, Shoe Mus
ant at the Department of Foreign Language Education, Middle East Technical Launch, Uut Poetry, The Fiction Pool, What Rough Beast, Scarlet Leaf Review, Seshat, The Paragon Journal, Arcturus, Constellations, the Same, The Mystic Blue Review, an, The Remembered Arts Journal, Terror House Magazine, and Dash. Her work sic Press, and Havik: Las Positas College Anthology.
CLS FER
RGUSON
Writing Mark Salling
CLS FERGUSON
A heat punches me in the sternum and radiates outward. I’m sitting in m Lush brand Golden Egg bath bomb in the warm water. The bomb sputter tricked by the yellow golden lens complete with gold glitter flecks. My 36 thighs, pasty white and coated in mosquito bites appear their slimmer, 16 porcelain selves of yesteryear. Mark had his own golden egg, making him more beautiful than he was. I’ve just finished reading Ben Spatz’s 2017 L embodied research. I’m interested in the #MeToo movement. I was fana Mark Salling. Did he victimize me, too? Or am I revictimizing his victim on the page?
my bathtub. I place a rs, releases. My eye is 6 year old, widened 6 year old, smooth, lily mself always appear Liminalities article on atically enraptured by ms by giving him space
About CLS Ferguson
CLS Ferguson, PhD is a pushcart nominated writer with accolades in film, performs, writes, paints, teaches and rarely relaxes. She is author of two f and two chapbooks: The Way We Were and Tumbleweed: Against All Odds. Sh http://clsferguson.wix.com/clsferguson
academia, and creative writing who speaks, signs, acts, publishes, sings, full-length collections: God Bless Paul and Soup Stories: A Reconstructed Memoir he is raising her daughter and dog in Alhambra, CA.
ELENA LELIA
A RADULESCU
Remembering Grandmother
ELENA LELIA RADULESCU
Early morning she would strip the beds down to their wooden bones, lift blankets, toss sheets, and brush dreams left idle on pillow lace. Then, like Good Mother Friday from an old fairytale she would stir and poke with a stick the linen boiling, bubbling in a pot in the yard. At noon, pinned on the line, the whites would swing, sway, raise wings, while I, a child of five or six, would hold my breath afraid that our world would sail into the mountains.
About Elena Lelia Radulescu
Elena Lelia Radulescu was born in Romania. She has a masters degree in philosophy from her native country, and degrees in education from Hunter College and Columbia University, NYC. She worked as a teacher of the blind and visually impaired in New York City public schools. Presently she is retired, and lives in Katy, Texas. She has been published with poetry, short stories and essays by Visions International, Square Lake Review, Karamu, Chelsea Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Cape Rock Review, Persimmons Review, Texas Poetry Calendar, Mutabilis Press Anthology, Twisted Endings, Forgotten Women Anthology, Calyx Journal, Magnolia Journal, Trajectory Journal, Gastronomica Journal and other publications. For the last two years she has been working on a middle grade novel in verse.
GABRIELA PENE
ELOPE CAROLUS
To Each Their Own
GABRIELA PENELOPE CAROLUS
It is a queersome world we inhabit. An ever-changing, and yet constant revelation of the past and present. Time has not changed our desires, pain or pleasures. Nor has our identities become another but our own to share. Then, why do you seek clarification for others coming out as their own? Society has selected the shortest straw. While hours have gone by. We fail to see the arms at work with the changing of time. Some of us are more than lovers while others are just friends.
About Gabriela Penelope Carolus
Gabriela Carolus is a social scientist and budding poet. She aims to write about terms and ideas that people take for granted as the ordinary and intimate. This year, Gabriela works as a Guest English Teacher in South Korea. She hopes that her readers will continue this journey with her to reveal the challenges of living and working across different continents as a millennial.
JADE H
HOMA
Persephone
JADE HOMA
i. she calls herself a pomegranate, and it’s synonymous with grief. the taste she left in my mouth on some alternative timeline. in that world, I planted a seed, and she didn’t destroy the flower before it opened. she didn’t pluck out the roots before it even had a chance to grow. ii. in this universe, girls love other girls freely. in this universe, dogs are never hurt. in this universe, you got on the plane. under my tongue, there is grief. behind that, sadness. anger still burning on the coals. waiting. even when I’m not. now create a tidal wave with your tears. smother the fire instead of her. let your anxiety do something useful for once and squeeze your hands until embers become ashes. leave the tenderness in a garbage disposal, a paper shredder, the note section of your iPhone where it does no harm.
iii. I wonder if things would have played out differently if we had kissed in person. slow danced across a movie theater parking lot. pressed flowers against our sleeping bodies. I wonder what you would have tasted like if you weren’t so scared. if you gave me a chance. if you did anything at all. iv. so you want to yell about fruit? my fingers peeled back the very essence of you until only craters remained. and still there I was, mouth around your throat, bleeding our love story dry for the masses; fingers plucking something so ripe and shoving it in the dehydrator until it matched my underwear after you were done with me juice ran down my chin and nobody blinked. people lined up for miles; tickets sold out in five minutes. everyone loves a show. v. oh little Persephone girl, you call yourself a god of suffering, but only when her name is in the footnotes. fist to heart, let my throat close up she didn’t even put up a fight
one second, a girl existed and the next, nothing so I’ll hold onto the anger with fire poker fingers because you didn’t sweep the earth barren or destroy the universe in your wrath the second I was gone you didn’t kill the flowers or the trees when you lost me everyone kept breathing.
About Jade Homa
Jade is a passionate dog lover, pasta enthusiast, and sapphic poet. At age 19, she has already written over 50 poems and several short stories; her work primarily focuses on themes of softness, gender, mental illness, sexuality, and intersectional feminism. Jade’s work has been published in BlazeVOX, Anti-Heroin Chic, Seshat, Moonglasses Magazine, and The Internet Void. Her poetry will also be published in print for Sinister Wisdom 2019. Jade’s debut poetry book, growing pains, will be released in spring 2020.
JOSSLYN
TURNER
The English Teacher
JOSSLYN TURNER
Keys clang against my hip as I tread through the halls of Central Valley High. I look like a ghostbuster with the vacuum pack strapped on my back. Perhaps, in a way, that is what I do; bust ghosts of the things students leave behind— candy wrappers, crumpled papers, erasers torn from ends of pencils, discarded onto the classroom floors. There is an English teacher here I think about. The day before last, she sits at her desk as I take the overflowing trash. We talk about college and my dream of getting an English Degree. Now, I expect to see her again when I go to her classroom. It smells like vanilla from the warmer plugged into the wall. I leave a note on her desk: Life is too short to let an opportunity slip by. I leave my number, but she will never call. Required reading left on deserted desktops— Of Mice and Men, Animal Farm, and A Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass. A Richard Wright poster in front of me: The impulse to dream was slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing. Perhaps, one day, I will be that teacher
who inspires her students to discover new ways of looking and seeing.
About Josslyn Turner
Josslyn Turner is a trans writer, poet, artist, and mother to two boys. She i College. Her literary works have been published in MJC’s Celebration of the H California.
is currently studying English Literature and Creative Writing at Modesto Junior Humanities, South 85, Across & Through, and Penumbra. She lives in Modesto,
KAREN H
HORSLEY
Be My Angel
KAREN HORSLEY
Be my angel, ever present You sit on my shoulder and whisper in my ear You guide me in my thoughts and actions I know you are there And that I’m not alone The life we travel we travel alone As time changes all and people fade from view Transient visitors to life We find ourselves the only constant
About Karen Horsley
Karen Horsley is a British poet who began writing following diagnosis and treatment for breast cancer, through poetry Karen found a way to express and release her emotions. Her work has been published in anthologies by nOthing BOOKS and Forward Poetry. Karen’s debut collection of poetry Kaleidoscopic Beauty is available on Amazon.
KAREN PIERC
CE GONZALEZ
Prarie Preserves
KAREN PIERCE GONZALEZ
In the cellar’s cool darkness Where roots have grown eyes, I can see shelves of women distilled into silence. Preserved in jars I pry open, Their prairie wisdom -birthing, baking, building Spreads like jam Over thick slices of bread.
Ripe with Promise (Fortunee)
KAREN PIERCE GONZALEZ
In this old Inverness house with beveled windows that prism time, I am again at my grandmother’s for the summer. As always, she is no longer here. But her apron, damp from the wash of morning dishes, hangs near the stove, and her freshly-cut flowers swirl in a bowl of etched glass on the table. Still with dew, their delicate fragrance opens into petals of comfort that close to embrace me. Liquid, her voice shimmers on the lake of afternoon light that ribbons itself into lace. It embroiders her name on my sleeve: Fortunee. A name I hear when I look at the baskets of fruit on the porch. Unpreserved, they will change when this summer no longer sleeps on the steps like a lazy cat. But for now, they are ripe with promise.
About Karen Pierce Gonzalez
Karen Pierce Gonzalez’s fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in T Journal, Visual Verse, Tiny Thimble Magazine, and other publications.
The San Francisco Chronicle, Postcard Poems and Prose, Big Blend Magazine, Lagom
LAURA I
INGRAM
After You Killed Yourself
LAURA INGRAM
A flat-fronted school bus skids into a snow bank Singe file third-graders pinging out everywhere like a snapped string of seed pearls. Only your last name made the news. No high school head shot. My unmade bed is the mortician’s tilted table half-sleep the scalpel to my sternum dreams yanking my heart out, hand over hand. I wake with the sweaty sheet pulled up to my eyes. Mornings stay slick, embalmed by splashes of instant coffee I use your shampoo in the shower remember reading that hair keeps growing for a week or two after. I step out of the spray snip my ponytail just below the chin. I cannot see my face in the mirror fog—only the shrugging of shoulders— the dark damp of my hair clogging the drain. I drive, city slum scratching its back against my car windows sky static as the jazz station. I park farther away from the Walgreens than I need to still at the front window’s Tylenol tower. Touching my fingertips to my unmoved mouth in the glass, I startle at my own chapped lips skinny legs and split ends coffee stain on my coat pocket.
I want to hug myself so incipient— pressing a chaste kiss to the distillery of a window reflection, mauves muted I go in to buy my toothbrush. I remember you.
About Laura Ingram
Laura Ingram is a tiny girl with big glasses and bigger ideas. Her first colle Her poetry and prose have been published in fifty-four literary magazines, student, Laura studies creative writing. She loves Harry Potter and Harry S
ection, a book of poetry, was released with Desert Willow Press in May 2018. , among them Gravel, Blue Marble, and Juked Literary Journal. A sophomore Styles.
LAUREN SC
CHARHAG
Hirsute Woman
LAUREN SCHARHAG
I am all hair. Not the charming furriness of Frida Kahlo’s ironical unibrow, the sensual sepias of her lounging, nude, dense mat of pubes and happy trail on display; no Janis Joplin flower-child locks, fuzzy and aromatic as a cannabis stem, thick as shag carpet you can sink in up to your ankle boots. I am not even the languid sophisticate, a post-war Parisienne, shocking my American boy-liberators with my sexual mores, my capacity for pastis, and my underarm stache. My head is a forest where tigers could hide. My downy upper lip is the sere grass of the veldt, aching for the thick white pour of your infusion. It has spread to my cheeks so that when you turn me to the sun, I present a sort of reverse halo. In another life, I imagine I was a bearded lady, maybe even one of the Aceves, circus performers extraordinaire; so swarthy, I had to be made a showcase. Every night, a box-office sellout, a special midnight show, midway popcorn and a dozen marriage proposals. Beneath this pelt, no one can see me blush. My spines rival the succulent bodies of Lareto. The briars of my eyebrows raise the roof on questions of femininity. The down of my arms and my prickly-pear legs would drive Mr. Eliot to distraction across the teacups, my natural merkin would make a Wookiee growl, and yes, “Venus in Furs” is my personal anthem. Lionel Sweeney’s got nothing on me. But for now, I must resign myself to the doctor writing hirsute on my chart,
and delicately inquiring if I’d considered having hormonal testing done. Every other month, my hairbrush breaks in half, bristles snagged, half-swallowed by the frizzy undergrowth of my scalp. I get exactly one use out of each Lady Bic, (one per leg, that is) and I buy an extra-strength hair catcher for my shower drain. I am reduced to parlor tricks in which I make shampoo disappear at a frankly alarming rate. I comb my tresses down over my face, don a pair of shades, and behold: my best Cousin It impression. Everything in me shrieks abundance to a world that hears only excess, and the feeling is mutual. I refuse to strip down to oozing nicks and razor burn. I refuse to be scorched earth beneath a wax-and-depilatories campaign. I am Diana, the wolves and the glade. Track me through the wilderness. Wherever I roam, you’ll find my fleece caught on brambles. I am the invasive kudzu, the crabgrass. Try to trim me and I just grow back.
About Lauren Scharhag
Lauren Scharhag is an award-winning writer of fiction and poetry. She is t Poems, and the co-author of The Order of the Four Sons series. Her poems an trampset, Whale Road Review, The Flint Hills Review, Io Literary Journal, Gamb more about her work, visit: www.laurenscharhag.blogspot.com.
the author of Under Julia, The Ice Dragon, The Winter Prince, West Side Girl & Other nd short stories have appeared in over sixty journals and anthologies, including bling the Aisle, and Sheila-Na-Gig. She lives on Florida’s Emerald Coast. To learn
LINDA M
M. CRATE
won’t silence my magic
LINDA M. CRATE
they’ve told me i dream too big since day one, but perhaps their dreams aren’t big enough; i want to be challenged, i want an adventure so that when i do get everything i aspired for and more that i have a story worth telling— always they told me to get my head out of the clouds, but i refuse; i always resisted and for that they hated me but i am a wild thing outside of their control— they make it clear i am not their cup of tea because i burn them in some way, but i am only trying to live my best life; just trying to bloom i am a flower that resurrects an immortal flame, a phoenix only wishing to spread feathers of love and light— always they’ve tried to silence my magic, but it speaks loudly because i have a power and voice all my own.
About Linda M. Crate
Linda M. Crate’s poetry, short stories, articles, and reviews have been published in a myriad of magazines both online and in print. She has five published chapbooks A Mermaid Crashing Into Dawn (Fowlpox Press - June 2013), Less Than A Man (The Camel Saloon - January 2014), If Tomorrow Never Comes (Scars Publications, August 2016), My Wings Were Made to Fly (Flutter Press, September 2017), and splintered with terror (Scars Publications, January 2018), and one micro-chapbook Heaven Instead (Origami Poems Project, May 2018). She is also the author of the novel Phoenix Tears (Czykmate Books, June 2018).
MAGGIE
BURTON
I watch you, beheading
MAGGIE BURTON
capelin at the kitchen sink. Dead long before you gathered them last summer, they were simply tricked by high tide, by fog, by the promise of rolling back out to spawn in peace, never having known you. I hear them, singing, rehearsing, lamenting, performing an ode to the freedom of oceans somehow still resonating, settling in my ears for me to live with. The tendons on the backs of your thumbs startle me as you pop off their heads. I am struck by the quick parallel lines that appear only to recede once again under thin skin of hands. Did you catch my darting eyes? I panic. Imagine you, pulling up the base of my skeletal self, fingers tugging at it like a piece of knitting needled so tight it would never fit anyway. Tension is high and stakes are low but if you smile at me I will lose it—if I shut my eyes
I see myself joining the nautical chorus, all of us warbling together as my head plops on top of the never-closing mouths of voiceless vertebrates in the kitc
chen sink.
About Maggie Burton
Maggie Burton lives in St. John’s with her two children. She is a musician, Labrador Arts and Letters Award for poetry and a Riddle Fence poetry prize Fence, Grain, Plenitude, and at Newfoundland Quarterly Online.
, city councillor, and poet. She is the recipient of a Newfoundland and e. Her poems have been most recently published or are forthcoming in Riddle
MARY K O’
’MELVENY
Ice Skating on the Moon (On the Day After...)
MARY K O’MELVENY
I dreamt we went ice skating on the darkest side of the moon where no one could find us where waterfilled comets fell and no one heard a sound we were hidden so deep in penumbras deep space probes missed our sparkle the magic arc of our brazen triple axels dark poles hid us solar windstorms dropped frost crystals we leapt to catch them before they could show up on radio waves we were determined to stay submerged to swirl to leap to places where no could find us where we would be audacious free of judgments pure as crystals
About Mary K O’Melveny
Mary K O’Melveny is a recently retired labor rights lawyer living in Washington DC and Woodstock NY. Her poetry has been published in various print and on-line journals and blog sites such as Writing in a Woman’s Voice and The New Verse News. Mary’s poetry chapbook, A Woman of a Certain Age, was published by Finishing Line Press in September 2018.
MARGARE
ET KOGER
A Rough Sea
MARGARET KOGER
Complaint and Desire come into the bar together. The hostess leads them to cushioned wicker chairs. The rattan groans as the two swivel their seats for a better view of the sea. “It’s really rough out there today,” Complaint avows. She opens a small notebook with a self-portrait of Frida Kahlo on the cover and begins to write. Desire leans back and stretches out his legs as he gazes at the young waitress approaching their table. After consulting the wine list, the two companions order a magnum of Grief to share.
About Margaret Koger
Margaret Koger is an educator with a writing habit. She lives and teaches in Boise, Idaho. Her poems appear in numerous publications, recently in Juke Joint, Little Rose, Amsterdam Quarterly, Red Rock Review, Collective Unrest, and Headway. In The Heartland Review, 2018,“Ripe Figs,” placed as a 2018 finalist in the Joy Bale Boone Poetry Prize competition.
MARTHA C
CLARKSON
How to Become Addicted to Valium
MARTHA CLARKSON
Have a father who died in April shouting your name before his head hit the curb and whose estate still breathes legal life pressed by Medicare and recent wives In the same week have your alcoholic mother diagnosed with pancreatic cancer months too late and you’re all that ever mattered only child Have a sympathetic doctor who treats old people mostly and can’t stand to see the stress riding across the forehead of the young patient he likes to give physicals to handing out the jackpot of double-digit refills Learn quickly that sleep comes easier and stays longer when the pill is taken with vodka (before brushing the teeth of course) that a pill with beer at lunch can make afternoon spreadsheets glorious and symbolic While you’re experimenting
with tequila, gin, and Maker’s Mark as viable companions your husband could be sleeping with, say, the deli manager fucking dangerously close to the meat slicer your kids may have dropped out of high school anything is possible naked at the sink at one, three, and five
Rock, Paper, Scissors
MARTHA CLARKSON
Throw down your best rock puddlestone, darrybone I’ll cover it with deckled-edge vellum blades of your shears sharpened on a whetstone will slash my curling parchment my own chunk of quartz will crush the metal leaves of your acuminate tool we’ll stack the rocks on coastal flats bury scissors in forgiving sand cast white shreds of paper to wind
About Martha Clarkson
Martha Clarkson is a writer, poet, photographer who plays tennis, bowls, and likes VW Beetles. Find her at this place: www.marthaclarkson.com
RACHEL ESSAF MAHER
Hunger
RACHEL ESSAF MAHER
What is this white button-down shirt with a tie powerful attraction lingering years in the making without explanation, smile with the dimple flung up high, the kind that makes you want to grab him by the shoulders and scream— I can almost feel the heat of the iron pressing out the fabric, smooth smooth like the voice I wish he would use with me, stretched tight now across wide shoulders— O! O! I long to touch him anywhere, everywhere from buttons to collar to cuff, run my fingers down the satin promise pointed to by the tip of his tie, O! but now— now maintain decorum! Good wives don’t think like this.
About Rachel Essaf Maher
Rachel Essaff Maher lives in Southern Vermont, where she writes poetry, fiction, and personal essays. Her work has previously appeared in The Pitkin Review, Sediments Literary Journal, the West Texas Literary Review, Spires, and other literary publications. She also contributes the occasional personal essay to the local shopping guide, the Vermont Money Saver.
WINDFL
LOWER
Crumb Cake
WINDFLOWER
A bowl butter and cinnamon flour and sugar her hands over mine mixing slicing the butter into coarse morsels I can still taste These same hands that reached for mine years later when ingredients were a foreign language and memories were only mine to keep the wind whisking at their edges carrying their scent across decades My mother’s kitchen
Inside Out
WINDFLOWER
I want to turn the days inside out remove the lint that got in the way of their perfection. I want to make sure I pay attention to how they feel against my skin their smoothness their roughness. I want to empty the pockets and fill them up again my fingers searching the edge of memories. I want to examine their creases their fraying for signs of what’s to come. I want to wear them over and over until I am ready to take them off.
About windflower
windflower, her wife and two border collies live on the Mendocino Coast. S Women’s Center where she published and edited, Chomo Uri, a women’s m in 1976. She remembers placing the first poem she wrote, at the age of nin French provincial dressing table. windflower is also a photographer celebrating the poetry in nature.
She co-founded the Feminist Arts Program at the University of Massachusetts multi-arts magazine and produced the first National Women’s Poetry Festival ne, in a flowered tan narrow-necked porcelain perfume bottle on her white
YONG TAK
KAHASHI
Room
YONG TAKAHASHI
A ring sits on the shelf On your side of the walk-in closet All your clothes now gone We fought when we purchased the house I thought the closet was too small To hold all the things I loved You thought it was adequate Happy with what you had I kept buying more treasures To fill up my empty heart It would never be enough To fill in the cracks between us Now the closet is too large It may take my entire lifetime To replace the empty space You left in my life
About Yong Takahashi
Yong Takahashi won the Chattahoochee Valley Writers National Short Story Contest and the Writer’s Digest’s Write It Your Way Contest. She was a finalist in The Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Southern Fried Karma Novel Contest, Gemini Magazine Short Story Contest, and Georgia Writers Association Flash Fiction Contest. Some of her works appear in Cactus Heart, Crab Fat Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, Gemini Magazine, Meat For Tea, and Twisted Vines.
Thank You
Thank you for reading. We hope you enjoyed this anniversary edition of poetry from these talented poets. You can find more issues of Voice of Eve on our website www.voiceofeve.net or on Issuu. Thank you again, and blessings to you from our staff. Richard Holleman Editor, Voice of Eve Staff Sarah Rodriguez, Editor