This selection, chosen by guest editor Layla Lenhardt, is from In the Cosmic Fugueby Jocelyn Heath (Kelsay Books 2022).
Neptune’s Pursuit
God of trident and thrusting current, god whose wet muscles pin me to sand and hold me down while you fill every space of my body—
even your gentlest current drags us out, leaves known shores unreachable. Nude god behind a blue planet’s drape, I would fight your saline kiss
and all that followed. When you clutch a girl in your crests, with few strokes can she pull her own way. I do not float willingly.
I toe your edge, touch driftwood fingers, let a boy swing me in his arms but not keep me. His white is your foam. His skin oozes clear salt.
When he moves to swell over me, I have already swum away.
Jocelyn Heath is an Associate Professor in English at Norfolk State University. Her first poetry collection, In the Cosmic Fugue, came out in November 2022. Other creative writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Crab Orchard Review, Poet Lore, Sinister Wisdom, Flyway, and Fourth River. She is an Assistant Editor for Smartish Pace.
Layla Lenhardt (she/they) is an American poet. She is founder and Editor-in-Chief of the (currently on hiatus) national literary journal 1932 Quarterly. Her essays, poems, short prose, and interviews have been published across various types of media, including a pickle jar, a post card, and a bathroom stall in Dublin. She is a 2021 Best of the Net Nominee and was a judge for Poetry Super Highway’s Annual Contest in 2022. Her first full-length poetry collection, Mother Tongue, was published by Main Street Rag Publications (2023). She is a 2022 alumna of the SAFTA residency.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Layla Lenhardt, is from In the Cosmic Fugueby Jocelyn Heath (Kelsay Books 2022).
Clippings
Up, up above, the ecstatic swirl of wasps. Belly, thighs, hips, the spaces between. I measure myself with fingers: a hurt necessary as the gravel in my back. Unfold the topography of a woman:
cleft of freckled breast, cinch of silk at the waist— photos glisten from sun silvering the hedge where I hide. Through the summer, the globed nest swells.
Jocelyn Heath is an Associate Professor in English at Norfolk State University. Her first poetry collection, In the Cosmic Fugue, came out in November 2022. Other creative writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Crab Orchard Review, Poet Lore, Sinister Wisdom, Flyway, and Fourth River. She is an Assistant Editor for Smartish Pace.
Layla Lenhardt (she/they) is an American poet. She is founder and Editor-in-Chief of the (currently on hiatus) national literary journal 1932 Quarterly. Her essays, poems, short prose, and interviews have been published across various types of media, including a pickle jar, a post card, and a bathroom stall in Dublin. She is a 2021 Best of the Net Nominee and was a judge for Poetry Super Highway’s Annual Contest in 2022. Her first full-length poetry collection, Mother Tongue, was published by Main Street Rag Publications (2023). She is a 2022 alumna of the SAFTA residency.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is pleased to announce the guests for the May installment of our reading series, poets Valerie A. Smith and Anthony DiPietro. Join us on Thursday, May 16th at Pretentious Beer Co. from 7:00-9:00 PM for a reading followed by an open mic hosted by Shlagha Borah. Sign-up for the open mic begins at 7 PM sharp and is limited to 10-12 readers.
Valerie A. Smith has a PhD in Poetry from Georgia State University and an MA in Professional Writing from Kennesaw State University where she is a Lecturer of English. A 2022 Sewanee Writers Conference Scholar and Hambidge Center Fellow, her poems appear in The South Carolina Review, Aunt Chloe, Weber—The Contemporary West, Spectrum, Obsidian, Crosswinds, Dogwood, Solstice, Oyster River Pages, Wayne Literary Review, and elsewhere. Find her online at www.valeriesmithwriter.com.
Anthony DiPietro is a gay sex poet and arts administrator originally from Providence, RI. He has lived throughout New England and in California, New York, Oregon, and Tennessee. A graduate of Brown University with honors in creative writing, he earned a creative writing MFA at Stony Brook University. Now deputy director of Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, he resides in Worcester, Massachusetts. He composed his 2021 chapbook And Walk Through (Seven Kitchens Press) on a typewriter during the pandemic lockdowns. kiss & release (Unsolicited Press, 2024) is his debut collection. His writing and readings are featured on his website, www.AnthonyWriter.com
Our community partner for May is FACK (First Aid Collective Knoxville)! FACK is a radical mutual aid collective bringing resources and support to our city’s underserved. Resisting the scarcity and isolation imposed by capitalism through sustained community care, harm reduction, and direct action. Recently, the First Aid Collective in Knoxville has been working with students at the University of Tennessee who are protesting the war in Palestine and calling on the administration to divest. Donations will help with supplies and other mutual aid efforts.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Layla Lenhardt, is from Burnby Sara Henning (Southern Illinois University Press 2024).
Burn
If middle age has a shape, it would be the body singing, word by luscious word. My body’s glory caught in my lungs.
If I could, I would uncry myself, send my body back to my mother’s womb, where my father once signed his name
in blood. I hung there, seam of cells, fixed to my holy order—love’s microscopic blaze so much like breathing.
My heart, still twined to my mother’s. Her body, it held me like she hadn’t given up. I long to be pulled from my mother
some August long ago and lie on her chest, naked, cord uncut, hair matted to my skull. I want to fill again the hollow in my mother
death will not take as its house. Teach me, body, to unscar what is scarred. To cherish the uncharitable. My breasts, whipped
philosophers. My eyes, a murder of crows. My thighs are engines, leave traces of fire as I rise up. Watch me rise up.
Sara Henning (she/her) is the author of the poetry collectionsBurn(Southern Illinois University Press, 2024), a 2022 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s Selection; Terra Incognita (Ohio University Press, 2022), winner of the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize; and View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and the 2019 High Plains Book Award. She was awarded the 2015 Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize and the 2019 Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award. She’s a recipient of scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Appalachian Writers’ Workshop. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Marshall University, where she coordinates the A.E. Stringer Visiting Writers Series.
Layla Lenhardt (she/they) is an American poet. She is founder and Editor-in-Chief of the (currently on hiatus) national literary journal 1932 Quarterly. Her essays, poems, short prose, and interviews have been published across various types of media, including a pickle jar, a post card, and a bathroom stall in Dublin. She is a 2021 Best of the Net Nominee and was a judge for Poetry Super Highway’s Annual Contest in 2022. Her first full-length poetry collection, Mother Tongue, was published by Main Street Rag Publications (2023). She is a 2022 alumna of the SAFTA residency.
While I read Alison Palmer’s Bargaining with the Fall (Broadstone Books, 2023)in my college’s library, I was trying hard to blink away tears. As someone all too familiar with grappling with the grief that surfaces when a loved one passes away, this collection was a punch to the gut (in the best way possible). In her collection, Palmer showcases how grief seeps into every aspect of life, even affecting the speaker’s dog whose “been throwing up for days” (6). The speaker recalls intimate details about the subject of these poems; the remnants of this person once overlooked while they were still alive now hold more weight. Images such as a dandruff-filled brush, moth-receipts, and “those things you stab between your teeth” (27) paint an intimate portrait of the “you” of this collection, making me as a reader feel connected.
Palmer cleverly employs images to convey the depth of grief. In “If Part of Woven Sun,” Palmer uses language to create a visual for how long one’s life is. She writes,
“Force me to listen to you
closely, to consider your shortened thread
of life with a measuring rod” (4).
The physicality of this image makes it so haunting and heartbreaking. The concept of measuring someone’s life—something so precious—with a measuring rod, lingers with me. I think about my childhood friend who passed away at eighteen, how short her measuring rod would be. This line also speaks to the heart wrenching fact that some people are remembered not for their life, but for their death. How sometimes we fail to remember what a late friend or family member laughed at, what their favorite song was, what food makes us think of them. Instead, we focus on the details of their ending: where they ended, how old they were, how it happened.
In “Your Shadow, At First Meaning Me,” I was moved by how evocative and striking the language was, as well as how the speaker aims to reimagine death as something that shouldn’t be experienced in isolation from others. The poem powerfully begins with the line: “Finality should be shared, shouldn’t it” (5). Palmer ends this first line with a period, instead of a question mark, signifying that this isn’t a question the speaker is asking for reassurance, it’s a statement they are telling the reader. When I encountered this line, I thought of “finality” as referring to death, the end of something or someone. I interpreted this line in two ways: death should be shared, and, grief should not be experienced alone. Later on in the poem, the speaker goes on to “Re-imagine our first cries; they sound almost like the last” (5). Here the speaker suggests that there is little difference between someone’s first laugh as a newborn and someone’s last laugh, later in life as an adult. The speaker poses the notion that birth and death really aren’t that different from each other. The use of “our” here suggests a collective birth and death. Perhaps the speaker is reimagining or rewriting this person’s death to cope, wondering what if they had died together so this person didn’t have to experience death alone.
Palmer doesn’t shy away from honesty throughout Bargaining with the Fall, even in the speaker’s most vulnerable moments. In “The Falling Bargain,” the speaker asks, “I repeat you / mid-panic / over and over; which moment is best to save you?” (42). This line perfectly encapsulates the feeling of guilt that arises after a loved one has passed away, when you can’t help but look at yourself in the mirror and wonder if you could go back in time, if there was anything you could have done to save them. I found comfort in reading these words; they made me feel less alone in my own feelings of guilt surrounding the death of a loved one. In the following poem “Don’t Wait Until the Bitter End,” the speaker confesses, “I want / to keep the succulents alive, to prove I can” (43). This line tackles the experience of wanting to prove to others, and maybe even to yourself, that you’re still capable of living even amidst the grief. That you’re still able to go on with life, to live in this world, without this person you love in it.
Palmer doesn’t dance around feelings, doesn’t care to make grief palatable and sugarcoated. Palmer ends the poem “Answer Me” with the line, “Sometimes, being lonely means lulling / into the safety of it” (11). There is so much loneliness in grief. Almost four years after a personal loss of my own, reading this collection made me feel seen in my grief that still lingers. When I found out about the death of my childhood friend from my mother, I couldn’t get out of bed for days. I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that I had to live in a world without her in it, didn’t understand why I deserved to live but she didn’t. I wish I had Bargaining with the Fall back in 2020, when I was coping, but I’m glad I have these poems today. Better late than never.
Annalisa Hansford (they/them) studies Creative Writing at Emerson College. Their poetry appears or is forthcoming in The West Review, The Lumiere Review, and Heavy Feather Review. They are the co-editor-in-chief of hand picked poetry, a poetry editor for The Emerson Review and Hominum Journal, and a reader for Sundress Publications.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Layla Lenhardt, is from Burnby Sara Henning (Southern Illinois University Press 2024).
The First Years
Locals call it the gates of hell, crater in the Turkmenistan desert burning
forty years. The longest-burning fire began six thousand years ago—an Australian
coal seam in New South Wales ignited by lightning, smiting the biome into barren trails.
But I always come back to the coal seam blazing under Centralia, Pennsylvania,
where a trash fire plumed against veins of earth. Since then, it razors through mines, sixty years
feeding on bituminous coal. This is us, love, hitched at our flash points, flaming head of us
lit incandescent. We are soot torching ultraviolet, photon emissions burst
from atoms. We wear each other’s infrared bands. In outer space, any flame turns to blue sphere.
But here, our first year, we radiated white. Rages birthed divorce threats, smelted into sex.
Now, we are flameless combustion, licked flint, divine red. Love exists in spite of us.
Sara Henning (she/her) is the author of the poetry collectionsBurn(Southern Illinois University Press, 2024), a 2022 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s Selection; Terra Incognita (Ohio University Press, 2022), winner of the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize; and View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and the 2019 High Plains Book Award. She was awarded the 2015 Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize and the 2019 Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award. She’s a recipient of scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Appalachian Writers’ Workshop. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Marshall University, where she coordinates the A.E. Stringer Visiting Writers Series.
Layla Lenhardt (she/they) is an American poet. She is founder and Editor-in-Chief of the (currently on hiatus) national literary journal 1932 Quarterly. Her essays, poems, short prose, and interviews have been published across various types of media, including a pickle jar, a post card, and a bathroom stall in Dublin. She is a 2021 Best of the Net Nominee and was a judge for Poetry Super Highway’s Annual Contest in 2022. Her first full-length poetry collection, Mother Tongue, was published by Main Street Rag Publications (2023). She is a 2022 alumna of the SAFTA residency.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Layla Lenhardt, is from Burnby Sara Henning (Southern Illinois University Press 2024).
A Brief History of Skin
In the infinite meadows of heaven, Blossomed the loverly stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels. —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie
Return it, the moles constellating my right shoulder, deep brown poultice. My husband once kissed his way into its world. Bless it, biopsy knife
swiping through my flesh, my faith Unname it Nevus spilus, little Andromeda galaxy stretching my skin, its infinite halo of dark matter. Unwhisper the word
melanoma, those sleepless weeks I swore it glimmered, debris from an exploded star. Unclench my hand from its jigger of vodka,
uncurl my husband’s touch from my shoulder. Unwhisper the words cancer, mother. Unburden my skin from the blazing Utah May,
where, one spring, the sun ravaged me. Untangle me from recklessness, untruss the tumors from my mother’s blood.
Return her record player’s needle shirring through scarred vinyl, Mick Jagger throating blues through her house on Victory Drive.
Rebridle her hair to its messy knot, unveil the dime-sized mole on the back of her neck. Give them back, my father’s words for it—
forget-me-not of the angels, plush field of stars. Give her back her body when she still loved my father, when I still moved within her.
But if you can give me nothing, God, return her name for me—little one, infinite meadow of heaven.
Sara Henning (she/her) is the author of the poetry collectionsBurn(Southern Illinois University Press, 2024), a 2022 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s Selection; Terra Incognita (Ohio University Press, 2022), winner of the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize; and View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and the 2019 High Plains Book Award. She was awarded the 2015 Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize and the 2019 Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award. She’s a recipient of scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Appalachian Writers’ Workshop. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Marshall University, where she coordinates the A.E. Stringer Visiting Writers Series.
Layla Lenhardt (she/they) is an American poet. She is founder and Editor-in-Chief of the (currently on hiatus) national literary journal 1932 Quarterly. Her essays, poems, short prose, and interviews have been published across various types of media, including a pickle jar, a post card, and a bathroom stall in Dublin. She is a 2021 Best of the Net Nominee and was a judge for Poetry Super Highway’s Annual Contest in 2022. Her first full-length poetry collection, Mother Tongue, was published by Main Street Rag Publications (2023). She is a 2022 alumna of the SAFTA residency.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Layla Lenhardt, is from Burnby Sara Henning (Southern Illinois University Press 2024).
Letter in the Shape of a Banyan Tree
I always felt like a bird blown through the world. I never felt like a tree. —Mary Swenson, “Stripping and Putting On”
A year before my birth, Mother, you wished for a son to grow inside you. You’d call him banyan tree, strangler fig, boy strong as my father. When I came, you knew a chickadee starving for love could carry no legacy. Call me daughter who names creatures of the night like firstborns, daughter persuaded everything she loved could kill her—possums hissing, their luminous, naked tails. For consolation, you dressed me in pink, tried to make me your perfect girl. But I was a tomboy, skinned knees and tangled hair. Mornings, you’d smoke while braiding me, smooth elastic, Indigo Girls on the radio. Around my body, the ghost of a son grew. Jealous, I butchered my Barbies with scissors, played Atari all afternoon—Donkey Kong, rounds of Frogger in my beanbag chair. Sunlight seethed with me, lasered our duplex windows. Love meant learning to run. Mother, where does it end, this story of us? Nightmares remind me you’ve been gone seven years. Only now, my prayers are bioluminescent, tractor beams luring your ghost planet back. But my memory keeps you breathing, quiet metronome for cicadas flexing their tymbals in the yard. I still talk to you relentlessly, fevered questions about bodies, children, secret blood that won’t stop. When will you answer? Aristotle said time is how we position ourselves relative to change, but I want to believe any universe flexes like Heteractis aurora, turquoise Beaded Sea Anemone. Space only valley of muscle, and we are the clownfish slipping through each other to another world. What is a day without darkness? When tumors clustered your X-rays, Mother, you became infinite. I am not your banyan, but I branch and sow. I’m a bird blown through the world. Call me daughter, zeroed. I’ll never let you go.
Sara Henning (she/her) is the author of the poetry collectionsBurn(Southern Illinois University Press, 2024), a 2022 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s Selection; Terra Incognita (Ohio University Press, 2022), winner of the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize; and View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and the 2019 High Plains Book Award. She was awarded the 2015 Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize and the 2019 Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award. She’s a recipient of scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Appalachian Writers’ Workshop. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Marshall University, where she coordinates the A.E. Stringer Visiting Writers Series.
Layla Lenhardt (she/they) is an American poet. She is founder and Editor-in-Chief of the (currently on hiatus) national literary journal 1932 Quarterly. Her essays, poems, short prose, and interviews have been published across various types of media, including a pickle jar, a post card, and a bathroom stall in Dublin. She is a 2021 Best of the Net Nominee and was a judge for Poetry Super Highway’s Annual Contest in 2022. Her first full-length poetry collection, Mother Tongue, was published by Main Street Rag Publications (2023). She is a 2022 alumna of the SAFTA residency.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Layla Lenhardt, is from Burnby Sara Henning (Southern Illinois University Press 2024).
Good Kissing
After Jorie Graham’s “Two Paintings by Gustav Klimt”
The moon, the river bleeding out its glamour and spume—I wanted to marry it all. Mosquitoes circling nests of eggs, dragonflies feasting from dusk-blurred water. Why did no one teach me that behind every miracle is a god taking everything it wants? I'd trace my finger over the picture book drawing of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, savor the stories of women. Proverbs— Eve, the apple luscious as her sin. Genesis— Lot's wife's a salt goddess, her body no Sodom, torched. Salome. Delilah. Potiphar's wife. Jezebel. But when Robert, my aunt's boyfriend, bomber jacket hugging his biceps, edged my aunt against the sink as she sliced tomatoes, kissed her with an open mouth? I'd never seen a man touch a woman like that— his throat flushed, her bleached Farrah Fawcett cut catching in his mouth. She gasped, laughed, begged him to stop. Because I believed he was killing her, I ran at him, fisted raised. A humid afternoon in Georgia, 1989. Even now, I want to erase Robert's hands from her body— his touch proving I was stupid to love's hunger. Good kissing, my aunt said, is what a man and woman do to make a baby. Weeks later, she's pregnant when they go to dinner, hostess seating them in their favorite booth. The walls a montage of Elvis EPs— "Love Me Tender," "Viva Las Vegas." Photos of the King sealed under lacquer, the table's scratched history. For women in my family, every miracle begins with a man, an origin story. When she told him, he threw down twenties, walked straight into the night. No longer body but shadow of court hearings, custody payments, he was the hole her daughter would learn to call father.
Sara Henning (she/her) is the author of the poetry collectionsBurn(Southern Illinois University Press, 2024), a 2022 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s Selection; Terra Incognita (Ohio University Press, 2022), winner of the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize; and View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and the 2019 High Plains Book Award. She was awarded the 2015 Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize and the 2019 Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award. She’s a recipient of scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Appalachian Writers’ Workshop. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Marshall University, where she coordinates the A.E. Stringer Visiting Writers Series.
Layla Lenhardt (she/they) is an American poet. She is founder and Editor-in-Chief of the (currently on hiatus) national literary journal 1932 Quarterly. Her essays, poems, short prose, and interviews have been published across various types of media, including a pickle jar, a post card, and a bathroom stall in Dublin. She is a 2021 Best of the Net Nominee and was a judge for Poetry Super Highway’s Annual Contest in 2022. Her first full-length poetry collection, Mother Tongue, was published by Main Street Rag Publications (2023). She is a 2022 alumna of the SAFTA residency.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Layla Lenhardt, is from baby, sweetheart, honey by Emily Perkovich (Alien Buddha Press 2023).
3.30.22
The pavement cracks a little deeper with each winter, and my knees are a splintered mirror, a filly falls and falls, the film loops, the crumbling grows to standing, the standing eats the filly, becomes the mare, I become tender muscle, tense sinew,
This morning I coughed up a cadaver, palm size, a miniature death, I stained the tiles the color of a poltergeist, the pavement cracks, the grout splits,
The mare is sticky between the legs, blackberry compote clumping at her feet, the pit of the fruit blinks in slow motion, her knees hit concrete, she becomes a backwards aging, I help her pick the eyelashes from the syrup, we weep in unison
Emily Perkovich is from the Chicago-land area. She is the Editor in Chief of Querencia Press and on the Women in Leadership Advisory Board with Valparaiso University. Her work strives to erase the stigma surrounding trauma victims and their responses. She is a Best of the Net nominee and a SAFTA scholarship recipient. She is previously published with Harness Magazine, Rogue Agent, Coffin Bell Journal, and Awakenings, among others. She is the author of the poetry collections Godshots Wanted: Apply Within(Sunday Mornings at the River), The Number 12 Looks Just Like You(Finishing Line Press), & baby, sweetheart, honey (Alien Buddha Press) as well as the novella Swallow. You can find more of her work on IG
Layla Lenhardt (she/they) is an American poet. She is founder and Editor-in-Chief of the (currently on hiatus) national literary journal 1932 Quarterly. Her essays, poems, short prose, and interviews have been published across various types of media, including a pickle jar, a post card, and a bathroom stall in Dublin. She is a 2021 Best of the Net Nominee and was a judge for Poetry Super Highway’s Annual Contest in 2022. Her first full-length poetry collection, Mother Tongue, was published by Main Street Rag Publications (2023). She is a 2022 alumna of the SAFTA residency.
