Poetry Summer 2020 fiction all issues
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Cover Vecteezy
Rodrigo Dela Peña
If a Wound is an Entrance for Light
& other poems
Shellie Harwood
Early Evening, Late September
& other poems
William A. Greenfield
The Deacon’s Lament
& other poems
J. H. Hall
Immersion
& other poems
Kimberly Sailor
Two Aphids
& other poems
Sugar le Fae
Bagging
& other poems
Lauren Sartor
Shopping Cart Woman
& other poems
Nathaniel Cairney
Mushroom Hunting, Jackson County, Kansas
& other poems
Elisa Carlsen
Cormorant
& other poems
Daniel Gorman
The Boy Achilles
& other poems
Samara Hill
I Look for Her Mostly Everywhere
& other poems
Nicole Justine Reid
Returning to Sensual
& other poems
David Ginsberg
Butterfly Wings
& other poems
Katherine B. Arthaud
Café Sant Ambroeus
& other poems
George R. Kramer
Young Odysseus
& other poems
Amy Swain
In Praise of Trees
& other poems
Frederick Shiels
Bad October: 2016
& other poems
Matthew A. Hamilton
Summer of '89
& other poems
Chris Kleinfelter
Getting from There to Here
& other poems
Martin Conte
Ghazal for the Shipwrecked
& other poems
Natalie LaFrance-Slack
I Do Not Owe You My Beauty
& other poems
Susan Marie Powers
Dark Water
& other poems
Sugar le Fae
Facing
You can face your fears,
face facts, face an audience.
Here at the Mustard Seed,
we face merchandise
—face it forward
so customers can read
names, flavors, varieties.
Soymilk, vegan sushi, wine,
coffee station carafes,
condiments in the café.
Anything unsightly
is cleaned or carted away.
Customers don’t want
to know who made lunch,
what it takes to make it
into work each week.
A place where words are
turned, where you have to
face what you can’t
have—where facing it
means making it face you.
False Buddha
My body glows with the numb calm
of detachment. I’ve let it all go.
Rage. Envy. Especially of anyone
who can afford to shop here. I don’t want
their lives, churning with unresolved
trauma, coffee, and quinoa
(ethically sourced when it’s on sale),
their righteous, American guilt,
flash-fried, freeze-dried. I wipe cold sweat
from gluten-free, cashew-cheese
frozen pizzas. I ask easy questions:
Did you find everything okay, today?
Did you know bulk is 10% off on Tuesdays?
The answers don’t matter.
I do my best to banter. Bad jazz
blasts overhead. I double-bag 12-packs
of water. This is all so absurd.
I’ve chosen to stay, though no one
can see me floating here
cross-legged behind this register,
my gold robes licking the air like fire.
After the Lunch Rush
The lady with brain cancer
came through my line again today
in her knit cap and sweatpants,
apologizing for her cancer
if her manner seemed erratic,
leaving to milk and sugar
a coffee, while a line
of people waited.
Frustrated but patient,
I offered to carry her
groceries out to her car,
but she was taking the bus.
I wondered if cancer
had clarified or confused her,
counting out exact change.
Was it at last an answer
—a visceral resolve to live or
the sadness she’d been waiting for?
Bagging
I don’t need to brag, but I’m a master bagger.
No one has to ask me to bag their meat
separately, or double-bag their walk home.
I bag all bottles sideways to distribute the weight.
While you confer with the card-reader,
I’m stacking strata in my head: a tarot spread.
First, the Two of Water Bottles, prostrate
on the bottom, overturned but unspilt.
Then the Fruits of Labor: apples, oranges,
cherry tomatoes, cotton candy grapes
washed invisible of their Brown toil.
Reversed: the Fruits of Labor are unsellable,
bruised or ugly—juiced or (rarely) fed to the staff.
The Four of Soup-Cups goes
below To-Go boxes floated soft as UFOs.
Reversed: these Paper Lanterns will. spill. lava.
And obviously, Cold attracts Cold.
Glass under Plastic under Paper under Bread.
My trainees can read carts like star-charts.
The same physics built the pyramids.
All those years of Tetris have finally paid off.
Liberty Head Nickel
Checking out a customer, I broke
a roll of nickels and out she fell.
I thought she was a peso
and set her aside till after the rush.
Her reverse was less corroded,
easier to read: a Roman V inside
a Greek wreath, circled by her owner’s
name: United States of America.
Only then did I notice her,
searching the shine for her cameo:
her scarred, hard edges of light,
that far-away look still discernible
in her upturned gaze, the suppleness
where nose meets cheekbone.
America, France, Rome—
Liberty was always Apollo in drag,
the lost Colossus of Rhodes;
Helios, god of the sun and prophesy,
crowned in spikes of light,
who straddled the harbor nude
till an earthquake shook him down.
Her proud countenance,
struck within earshot of the Civil War,
is visible only at a certain slant.
‘Liberty’ shorn from her coronet,
13 stars halo her loose hair.
And beneath her severed head,
the year, last number rusted-over.
Activist, musician, photographer, Radical Faerie, and prize-winning poet, 
Sugar le Fae (PhD) has taught English Composition and Literature for over 15 years; served as the Social Media Director (2012) and Poetry Editor (2013) of PRISM international (UBC); and published dozens of poems and essays across North America. Follow Sugar on Instagram @sugar_lefae.