I became a woman the way that empty
space when circled with thread becomes
lace. & sex is the secret I kept as the zero
he & he & he, horn-stubborn, tried to goat
& buck inside. Even then, under them,
was I water, a body assured of its whole
unbroken by any fingered creature’s
punch or thrust. A wave, a wash, in any
language absolution, & any pretty little
way I move isn’t a show but a secret kept
between my self & the unmanned moon.
Emma Bolden is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press, 2016) and Maleficae (GenPop Books, 2013). She received a 2017 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Best Small Fictions, Poetry Daily, The Rumpus, StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Conduit, and other journals.
ISSUE FOURTEEN: La Mer Systyle
Jana Rosinski
speaking ovarian cancer
Emma Bolden
Roleplaying in Boardrooms
and Bedrooms
Bathemetry
Shankar Naryan
Psalm from the Old World
Oppenheimer
Heikki Huotari
I'll Be
Autonomic
Vivian Wagner
Notes for a Poem about News
Jesi Bender
The Wedding of Psyche
John Ebersole
The Vine of the Dead
Lana Bella
Plank & Resin
Cocaine Sunset
Travis Macdonald
A The Is The The Is The A
by Lila Zemborain
KJ Hannah Greenberg
Gators Packed Like Multinationals
in Excelsior
Terry Wright
Inside the Roche Limit
Donald Illich
Because an Island is Encouragement