I Think It's Time I Start Lying by Teddy Press

I wash my sheets at least once a week.
I remembered to take my medicine today, and
I am good at doing things that are good for me, like
drinking lots of water and getting enough sleep.
Every morning, I clutch my cup of coffee
as I stand in complete silence, wrapped in a cardigan and
staring out the window, deep in thought.
The scene resembles that of a limited-run HBO drama
starring a mid-40s housewife who just finished
shuttling her kids to school in a Mercedes
minivan—she returns to her kitchen that looks out on
the coastline of an upper class LA suburb and
ponders whether she is happy
in her relationship.
I look that put together when I wake up.
You know, clear skin and done-up hair.
I am happy with myself. 

Maybe I need to start telling more realistic lies.
I’ve been struck by lightning. Twice.
A unicorn followed me on the way home
from work and reminded me to pick up
my suit from the dry cleaners.
Yeah, and Adele sent the unicorn for me.
She does that sometimes.
I was actually the one who inspired her to
start singing, by the way. So you can thank me
for “Rolling in the Deep”.
Speaking of rolling in the deep,
one time, I discovered Atlantis, but I didn’t tell
anyone where it was because I liked
the people there so much (because they were
communists and it was utopian), and if America
ever caught word of its location, the fish would have been colonized.
And then they would probably be sad, and there would be
nets everywhere, and somebody would make an
aquatic themed cryptocurrency.

But maybe it’s fun to be fantastical sometimes,
to inhabit the fiction of a created world.
It doesn’t hurt anybody else if it’s a lie that
you tell yourself. Things to keep you calm,
wrap and tie you down like a weighted blanket,
hold you from bubbling over.
Affirmations, sure.
I do not chase, I attract.
Good things are coming my way.
I like my job and capitalism does not
feel like a crushing weight on my neck.
I am not consistently annoying.
I am successfully killing my darlings.
I do not want to isolate myself from the world.
I do not have feelings for the boy who I have
texted most every day for the past three years.
My friends enjoy interacting with me on a
regular basis.
I do not miss texting said boy when he disappears
into the woods for the summer. 
I do not feel a sense of overwhelming relief when he 
reemerges from the wilderness by popping up on my phone.
I can kill my darlings.
I will not be jealous of him when he wins a
Pulitzer Prize when I can’t even get myself
to apply to writing programs.  
My darlings are dead.
Someday I will believe the lies I tell myself.

Goose Down by Edorend Kroeger

after Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to be perfect,
but you must be mutable,
dimpling under prodding fingers,
ever prepared to succumb to beliefs that claim more power
than the rock pulled from the earth to build its church.
My chest ached with love for the world that
I was not allowed to express.
My innocent animal desires, disguised as
human nature, were smothered and condemned.
I tell you my despair, but you will not hear it.
At the exasperated desperation of my screams,
even the wild geese hiss and scatter.
Even the wild geese have jagged teeth, hungry with judgement,
biting at my fingers, outstretched in longing –
longing for a body that will never match mine,
longing for a man to love me as another man,
longing to find poetry in a life I never wanted to live.
Meanwhile, the sky captures more of the sun.
Meanwhile, words drown out the wind, and
engines rumble above the tired waves.
Meanwhile, the wild geese fall from the heavens,
like leaves prematurely pulled from branches,
red staining their downy, plastic-filled bellies.
Rubbing the feathers between my fingers,
I beg for a god that never saved me,
never saved the wild geese,
and forgot to assign me my place
in the family of things,
but I only hear the rhythmic thumping of time.

I am a Cancer, Which Means by Elaine Mei

in another life, I was a crab shuffling on the beaches of La Concha, sifting for trinkets of gold left behind by summer-pass visitors in San Sebastián. My moon is a Black Lilith and shows her best side when the tide comes. On my worst days, I am too hard to love. On my best days, I pay for the check and tell you to order anything you want. On my best days, patience is not the moon not the water but the cracks it flows through to meet the mouth of a river after twenty years of silence. On my best days, love is not the shell not the sand but the crab that skitters through, groping between muddled weeds, grasping for something gold I must give you but cannot yet find the tools to say.

Mi Primer Tatuaje by Edgar Morales

You always made sure to remind me tattoos
were not accepted
under your terracotta roof,

to never draw on el templo de Dios– on the
beautiful, dark
brown skin He gave me.

One day, I felt brave and let my friend draw
on my arm
speckled with prepubescent hairs.

His warm hands pressed against my body
as he added
finishing touches to his art. I

was his art, my body his canvas. A large
flower wrapped itself
around my elbow and

my chest, still bare and clean. When you
came home from
work that day and saw the

flower choking my body, you yelled y pa que
chingados estás dibujando
en tu cuerpo and

gave me my very first tattoo. Your hand, cold
but soft, tried to
bruise my skin. But instead of

turning red it turned a darker brown– not quite
ink-black but no
longer the cinnamon skin you

say God blessed me with. The temple you told
me to worship and
take care of. I tried to explain

how it wasn’t me who drew the flower, but when I
said it was a boy who
touched my body with his

pen you went ahead and gave me my second tattoo,
right above my first,
across my left cheek. Amá, I

cried. Mom, ¡I'm sorry! My eyes swelling– I wasn’t sure
if from your words or
from your hand. You stomped out

of the restroom carrying a bottle of 95% isopropyl
rubbing alcohol and
threw it to me with the towel

we use to dry our dog off. Quítate eso ahorita. No
puedo creer que un niño
te estaba tocando. Tu

cuerpo. I stood over the sink, rubbing my body with the
alcohol and rinsing it
off with my tears as you watched.

But you and I both know that it’s much more
painful to remove a tattoo than
it is to get one.

Somedays I Do Not Want To Be Found by Mia Nelson

on the walk home, but this world is a street
where everyone I’ve ever known lives
& there is no hiding from the sometimes magnificent
conspiracy of love that reaches me as gently as
a voicemail from the opposite end of the earth.
Our neighborhood is full of baby grown-ups,
& we all know eachother and wave and sometimes
make the other laugh in the middle of the street like how spring comes suddenly.
I am learning to wear big yellow gloves when I wash the dishes in lemony soap;
I am learning how to check the mouse traps with more tenderness than revulsion;
I am learning to call my mother when I have nothing to ask for.
We are not old enough for old friends,
but I see how it happens: one day I wake up and forgive you
for reaching me through the phone
when you never once reached your fingertips
over the kitchen counter to hand me a tangerine.
One day, I wake up and let the girls who live on the corner
fix the straps on my dark dress, or push the hair from my face.
One day, I finally let all of the things that I do not want to find me
just find me. I will look in the mirror and say okay, so, honey,
we can make a context for anything and that’s called growing up.
I will wake up and decide that I have loved people with bones
I will never get back, that I will always have heard
someone’s voice break on the word enough. And even so.
It will be enough to walk myself home in the dark
and know I could run up to the door of nearly every little house
so gently bright against the navy spoon of the sky.
Sometimes I think that I would give anything
to not have to give anything ever again
& other days,

I would turn my pockets
inside-out.

After Annunciation, on a City Balcony in July by Eliza Dunn

Mary and I sip lemonade from mason jars, glass sticky
in our palms. In cheap folding chairs, we talk 
over the city sounds below—Mary tells me
about her broken washing machine
and the roses on sale at the farmers market 
and nothing about the roundness she hides under blue t-shirts.
Evening washes over us and I know
she is thinking about what is going to happen,
what she heard when she knelt at the voice
from above her head. It was thunder and white light
all at once and it told her not to be afraid—
blessed her, even. I ask her what it feels like
and she is quiet before she says it is like
holding breath inside herself, a trembling weight.
She looks over the city, its windows like so many mirrors.
Except for her hands, how tightly she grips her cup,
I’d think she was watching the sunset
instead of envying the birds, wondering where they go
when the world feels too big for their smallness.