Poetry Summer 2021 fiction all issues
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Cover
Diana Akhmetianova
Monique Jonath
Viscosity
& other poems
Alix Christofides Lowenthal
Before and After
& other poems
Rebbekah Vega-Romero
La Persona Que Quiero Ser
& other poems
Oak Morse
Incandescent Light That Peeks Through Secrets
& other poems
George Kramer
The Last Aspen Stand
& other poems
Elizabeth Sutterlin
Meditations on Mars
& other poems
Holly Marie Roland
Clearfelling
& other poems
Devon Bohm
A Bouquet of Cherry Blossoms
& other poems
Ana Reisens
In praise of an everyday object
& other poems
Maxi Wardcantori
The Understory
& other poems
William A. Greenfield
Sometimes
& other poems
Karen L Kilcup
The Sky Is Just About to Fall
& other poems
Pamela Wax
He dreams of birds
& other poems
Mary Jane Panke
Apophasis
& other poems
a mykl herdklotz
Mouettes et Mastodontes
& other poems
Claudia Maurino
Good Pilgrim
& other poems
Mary Pacifico Curtis
One Mystical Day
& other poems
Tess Cooper
Airport Poem
& other poems
Peter Kent
Congress of Ravens
& other poems
Kimberly Sailor
White Women Running
& other poems
Bill Cushing
Creating a Corpse
& other poems
Everett Roberts
Hagar
& other poems
Susan Marie Powers
Canada Geese
& other poems
Pamela Wax
He dreams of birds
that resemble you.
He resembles you. He is not a bird,
though when he jumps to dunk a ball,
he is suspended, like you dancing, a Chagall,
everything floating, houses and cows.
You visit when he sleeps. You are crow,
bluebird, cardinal, canary—you choose
the color, and he supplies the plumage,
shows me a single feather
left on his pillow in the morning,
lets me stroke it against my cheek.
Nuit et brouillard, Resnais, 1956
I was only ten when I first saw Night
and Fog, incriminated by all that nakedness—
jumbled bodies littered in camps,
ribs poking through threadbare flesh.
At twelve, at sleepaway camp,
I dressed under cover of night
or in the bathroom to not expose my nakedness,
too hairy, too guilty-fleshy,
or later, too timid to divulge
the nighttime stirrings that encamped
in my kindling flesh—
to be wholly naked
even to my budding sense of self. Flesh
now saggy, scarred, a mind guilt-full
of qualms, but bold as night
as I approach my sixties, I’m willfully naked
to the world. I prance without a stitch
before open windows at night,
backlit, when my guilt takes a form
other than flesh. I mix it with naked rage
because never again is pitched capriciously
in the ominous night tent of the world,
where I bite almost guiltless on sunny days
into the waiting flesh of a peach.
A rabbi and poet, 
Pamela Wax’s essays on Judaism, spirituality, and women’s issues have been published broadly, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Pensive Journal, Heron Tree, Green Ink Poetry, Sheila-Na-Gig, Pedestal Magazine, Pangyrus, Dewdrop, Naugatuck River Review, and Paterson Literary Review. Pam’s first volume of poetry, Walking the Labyrinth, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag in 2022. She lives in the Bronx, NY and the Northern Berkshires of Massachusetts.