Poetry Summer 2017 fiction all issues
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Cover Marija Zaric
Kathryn Merwin
For Aaron, Disenchanted
& other poems
William Stevens
Celestial Bodies
& other poems
Kendra Poole
Take-Off, or The Philosophy of Leaving
& other poems
AJ Powell
Mama Atlas
& other poems
Matt Farrell
Waves in the dark
& other poems
Timothy Walsh
Eating a Horsemeat Sandwich at Astana Airport
& other poems
Nancy Rakoczy
Adam
& other poems
Joshua Levy
Venezuela Evening
& other poems
Ryan Lawrence
Vegan Teen Daughter vs. Worthless Dad
& other poems
George Longenecker
Yard Sale
& other poems
Susanna Kittredge
My Heart
& other poems
Morgan Gilson
Dostoevsky
& other poems
Jim Pascual Agustin
The Annihilation of Bees
& other poems
Taylor Bell
Browsing Tinder in an Aldi
& other poems
David Anderson
Continental Rift
& other poems
Charles McGregor
The Boys That Don’t Know
& other poems
Cameron Scott
Ashes to Smashes, Dust to Rust
& other poems
Kenneth Homer
Inferno Redux
& other poems
Alice Ashe
lilith
& other poems
Kimberly Sailor
Marriage's Weekly Schedule
& other poems
Kim Alfred
Soul Eclipse
& other poems
Susanna Kittredge
Four Theories About My Ovaries
I. Deaf
Dear ovaries, can you hear me? For weeks
my pituitary has been screaming hormone
louder and louder, and still you don’t
respond. I imagine you
twiddling your proverbial thumbs
as you wait patiently for instructions that never
seem to come. You’re just starting to wonder
if you should look for other work.
II. Temperamental
I should have known that they would be
fussy artists like myself. In adolescence,
they were daring, releasing one egg after another
to an admiring reproductive system.
But as they’ve aged, the self-doubt,
the perfectionism have set in.
They are embarrassed by their haphazard
early work. Anxious that the eggs
they make will be ridiculous, they lie still
praying for precise inspiration to create
the perfect ovum.
III. Retired
Susanna, lookit—we’re pooped. We’ve been doing
this gig since you were, what, fourteen? Every
month: *pop* *pop*! We’re over it! We consider
our fortune made, like young tech entrepreneurs.
From now on, you’ll find us kicked back on the banks
of Fallopia, sipping luteinizing cocktails, rubbing balm
into our achy follicles.
IV. More
My ovaries are not craftsmen, not businessmen
or drones. They are not even poets.
But don’t call them failure or vestige.
Call them monks, eating from begging bowls
of artificial estrogen. Call them a pair of Pisces,
afloat in my abdomen, forever dreaming.
Medusa
There are conflicting stories of her origin.
She was born a scaly, serpent-headed monster,
or she started as a lovely maid.
She was virtuous or vain,
raped or wanton with the god Poseidon.
We know for sure that Athena took her severed head,
her frozen cry of fury and still-writhing snakes,
and mounted it on her shield to augment her own divine power,
a flat-handed thump to her war chest.
I look at the forked tongues of my hair’s split ends,
the dull smudge of mascara below my eyes
and speckle of toothpaste on my shirt.
What a weakling I am, never daring to be truly hideous;
smiling sweetly and dangling silver from my ears
lest I should turn a man to stone.
Apology
You’ve got that stab-eyed sweetness, apologizing
for some tiny thing. I know what it’s like to see black birds
between us and to want to turn them into smoke.
We’ll both be lonely this snowstorm—you with the sad
Vaudeville of your roommates; me with an empty house
and an internet I.V.
It’s better this way, because: look at me—
I’m writing again! And you—you’ve got your feelers
feeling in a new direction.
You didn’t need to apologize—I wasn’t angry;
I was only teasing you for being a tree
with so many daring branches
and so many stubborn roots.
My Heart
is a slowly dripping popsicle
visited only by half-starved hummingbirds
and nervous brown butterflies.
My heart is a traffic island, terrified
by the honking cars around it;
too stunned to comfort the wild-eyed pedestrians
stranded on its surface.
My heart is the cat that entertains a caress
until startled by its own pulse
into biting the hand and bolting
under the bed.
My heart is an empty notebook,
naked of ink, flipping closed
against the poet’s ravishing gaze.
Susanna Kittredge
’s poems have appeared in publications such as 14 Hills, The Columbia Review and Salamander as well as the anthologies Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006) and Shadowed: Unheard Voices (The Press at California State University, Fresno 2014). She has an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She lives in Boston where she is a member of The Jamaica Pond Poets and the Brighton Word Factory. By day she teaches middle school.