Poetry

Hinges

by Melissa Stein.
“You opened this door. Forced it back / 
on its hinges, drove in the thin wedge, saying / ‘I may need to enter at a moment’s notice…'”

Issue 15 Abilities and Disabilities
My Friend Paul Says

by Dominika Bednarska.
“if I slurred my speech, if I stuttered, /
if I could not swallow, which variable /
would make me less worthy of living?”

Issue 13 Growing Older
Telephone

by Judy Katz.
“These days I think of you / on the yellow chaise / with your Parkinson’s / and hatred of telephones, / and make myself call.”

Escape

by Susan Donnelly.
“Everything she did that day / was the hardest thing / she’d done, but it felt easy.”

Issue 35 Displacement
A SESTINA OF BAD NEWS

by Alex Johansson.
“There are more important things I should be doing at the age of forty-two,” / you say, showing me photos of your daughter in a pink, fluffy tutu and I…”

issue 38 2020 Prize Winners
Ordinary Psalm with Near Blindness

The world mostly gone, I make it what I want: / from the balcony, the morning is a silver robe of mist / I make a reckless blessing of it

Issue 9
“Silence = Death”  

by Rafael Campo.
“His worn-out T-shirt, black as mourning, black / as countless deaths, surprises
me— it screams…”

Issue 36 2019 Prize Winners
Dusk in Dupont Circle

by Martha Young.
“A wingspan so wide it soared beyond the sidewalk / like a small plane. I turned, I had to turn, find where it landed…”

Issue 38 2020 Prize winners
Synaptic Space

by Julie Dunlop.
“What happens in that leap /
that in-between, that cleft?”