Made-up feelings by Anna Costello

They study children to see if it was real,
if your heart really changes shape when you see it
drawn up in blotchy white-blue,
like a fog shedding and shrinking
they assure you
it is well-contained but you felt over your ribs
and wondered how bodies calculate space,
in biology you can believe in the invincible
and the plastic models they keep
at the doctor’s, except

You are not
the expert in your own weathering
a beautiful formula swallows and rounds out a detail
the way sand loses its old rock-scars,
the way a woman loses faith
“angel,” smoke rises
with his heavy marijuana breath
you ask him how much you’re supposed
to be feeling

Last night you stuck your fingers in an electric socket
and it made snow
did you believe the sad shit you said
about Christmas?
they want to scan again
prove that on the 24th,
you were crying in the Barnes & Nobles parking lot
what size is your heart now,
jaded, cynic, austere woman
he answers with thick fingers
and a wolfish look
it doesn’t really matter.

Goat Pen, After Rain by Eliza Dunn

When the rain stops here at this little camp by the lake
we decide to visit the goats—my campers and me.
They are eight years old and still growing into their bright
rubber rainboots, lurching and giggling around me.
It is early August—sky still flat with clouds.
Trees a brilliant green. We walk the wooded path
to the goats, my campers playing a rhyming game:
tree-me, goat-coat, green-bean. What is this called?
one asks, holding up a leaf as big as her face, and this?
pointing to a bright spray of goldenrod. Together,
we try to name everything around us, our voices flying out into green.
When we reach the goats, my campers press up close
to the fence, pony-tailed heads bobbing around me.
They call out to the animals, who emerge damp-coated and curious
from their covering and poke their wet noses through the wire.
You can talk to them, I tell them. Try it. Maybe they’ll talk back.
They’re quiet for a moment, thinking, before bursting into sound.
Hi goats, they say. Do you like the rain? one asks.
I do! I love the rain because it makes us stay inside,
all together. Do you know how to swim? I’m learning.
If I had a dandelion to pick right now I’d wish for you to turn into girls like us.
I miss my mom. Do you have a mom? I wish we could let you free
into a big meadow that goes on forever and ever. They wait, hushed and breathless—
silence, wind, water falling from the sky. Then from one goat,
a loud, mournful bleat. What did he say back? I ask my campers.
They roll their eyes. We don’t know, we don’t speak goat.
I want to tell them no, listen again. I want them to hear it—
the world speaking back to them, really! So I gather them in close
and ask them to close their eyes and I tell them what I hear: the water moving
in the puddles. The goats shifting in their muddy enclosure. Now you try.
Rain, one says. Rain, rain, rain. Someone’s laughing, another says.
somewhere far away but I can still hear them.
The goats are telling us something, one says. I think they miss their mom too.
It’s raining again but we stay for a moment, eyes still closed.
This green music and us, learning again how to listen.

Body, Immortal by Olivia Cao

I brush my teeth in my mother’s bathroom
as the sun is drowning outside
watching its golden yolk running,
seeping into the seams of the sky through
the reflection of a greasy window

And because, like all living things, it, too, is desperate
for company, I watch as it snatches with invisibly-visible arms
at the dead cells drifting, watch as the freckles
of severed body appear and reappear
in that beautiful decomposing light as if to say, yes,
we are still here, your forgotten corpses, you.

It is easy to forget that, as I inhale, everything
in the air, swimming between my fingers, is dead.
and then I’ll look up at a clipped nail moon embedded
in the sky, our starlit matrix, and, suddenly, some
swift remembrance

and you will lie — DNA ingrained — underneath its
keratin shell, say “I am eternal”
I swallow your breath, breathe in your body whose
leftover memory clings lovingly to my lungs,
say: you are. You are you are you are

finding self and slugs by Haley Banta

Why don’t you like him, I teased
holding his sticky spineless body blob
to the boy who loved eagles and orcas.

He said something about the wetness
about think venom which numbs tongues
and becomes a glump of nothing, sprinkled with salt.

But I like this about banana slugs
—this gentleness which re-morphs
lost limbs back to labor.

I like their hunger for cleaning evidence of death
content to build ecosystems between green blades,
without care for treetops or sea creatures.

I came to Washington a carcass, hoping
to belong with the wood nymphs;
to be siloed by siren song.

But it was brown speckles on the yellow slug
that reminded me that we have tiger in our dna.
The two of us got along nicely.

For what’s not to love about alien antlers as eyes;
about a thing sprouted, antennae first from the dirt,
or flung down from the sky, tightly clung to ancient asteroids?

The boy squealed when he slipped on goop
but the mucus stayed crawling calm, concerted, patient;
paying attention to between my toes, rooting.

I wanted to see the world how he saw it
so I laid my head down on the grass to watch him pass.
He just kept rolling along, and I felt at ease.

For what’s not to love about me if I can love
the slime shine kind of beauty in small putrid impossibilities?

Twilight Rain by Faith Guttman

Walking down the street,
sometimes I wonder if a car will hit me:
shatter my jaw
command my eyes to tear, stream,
soak the street
in blood.

I’m told I look nice in a red dress.
Do I look inside out to you?
Cut open, peeled back,
glittering like carefully stitched sequins
like drops of blood
so precise and beautiful
One, two, three, drops and
I’m Snow White,
frail and fragile and
so fair
I could be a ghost.

Sometimes I look in the mirror and think
Vampire
Too white to face the sun,
sparkly whites begging for blood
Just a taste… metallic
like a blade.
I could cut you with one
bat of my eyelashes,
watch you bleed like
that girl in the street,
breast torn from torso,
crystal tears lost in the crimson pool,
then drowned by the rain.

I open my umbrella and wait for the headlights.
They pass. I cross.

And I’m sure someone is drowning.

Green Girl (Ophelia) by Caitlin FitzMaurice

The frost-licked riverbank drinks water
That dances over centuries-smoothed stones
With ancient limbs.
These river rocks murmur ballads, sometimes:
Stories of the dead and gone and of those
Who have yet to feel the weight of pebbles on their eyes.

Green girl, you need not see with your liquid gaze,
For the river remembers, and it sings to you.
It has since it moved under granite and clay,
And you pressed your ear to the soft summer grass,
Humming a forgotten harmony. Green Girl,
With your Green thumb, you could pick a violet
And two more would grow. Your is the melody of wind—
Autumn leaves rustling, a dust storm
Sweeping through empty rooms.

Turn your ear from honeyed music vows,
From the ebb and flow of bloody tributaries.
They know what they are but not what they may be,
Only listening for echoes.
Elemental creature, they shut you in that silent tomb
And made you tie your daisy chain into a noose.
Your watery words slipped through human hands again
But will find their way back to the river.

how to price my childhood by Ally Burg

see it before it's gone!
open house
9 to 11 a.m.

featuring
three beds and two and a half baths and
refreshments and
that scratch on the floor
from when i thought i could fly
so i jumped off the couch and
that dent in the mantel
from when i swung my field hockey stick
during a particularly animated demonstration and
walls covered in
invisible ink messages
from my magic kit in the second grade.

my house sold quick, and there’s a new bike outside
right where we built tunnels in the snow and
where the sunflower grew five feet tall and
where i drew profane messages with chalk and
where that guy kissed me for the last time.

the new owners paint over another layer
to that already thick paint
in my bedroom
where it was once
white for a toddler
light yellow for two opinionated sisters who shared a room
(it was the only color they could agree on)
lime green for maturity’s sake
(they were middle schoolers now)
bright blue when her sister left for college
(she wanted something of her own)

it’s been four years
and i can still hear which stairs creak the loudest
and see those fluorescent lights in the basement.
i could open the bathroom drawer
to find bags of rubber bands for braces
that i refused to wear
and can feel the wooden table we colored,
under the guise that our parents wouldn’t notice,
and spot Magic Treehouse on that huge bookshelf,
scrawled with my name,
spelled with a backwards A.

but, alas,
my childhood has long been packed up and donated and sold,
along with my first car and my summer camp and my snow globe and my twin sized bed.
I drink tea for fun now
and don’t need to lie about my age in liquor stores.
I apply for big girl jobs in cities I’ve never been
and drive home all by myself to
a new town
in a bigger house
with my own bedroom
and not a single secret message on the wall.

so, alas,
my childhood,
see it before it’s gone!


sold!