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You threw missiles at me as if you were a Gazan and I an Israeli farmer in my chicken house   lit by blue bulbs stuffing live chickens into cages in the dead of night So this is what we have come to   You took over my life, you cried You took everything that…

— Jennifer Crider

Wilted until doused with water absorbing quickly into your soil. Your stem grows Crooked in awkward slant damaged from a fall, from birth or replanting. Yet still tall, taller than neighbors huddled in their sameness, blossoms competing for the sun’s affection. Yet you with crooked roots soaring higher and higher each day, not just to…

My fear is if I don’t find myself now — I will float aimlessly in the Afterworld grasping at others’ souls to claim an identity. Will I be nothing and everything all at once? Will I lose a self I never had to begin with? —Nikole Rodriguez-Wilson

Anna Wellman Rybat

Anonymous

She sang to me sweetly as the sun sat low in the late autumn the willow we sat under danced in the soft breeze as her laughter kissed my face her shadow turned to a dancing wraith it put my mother to the sword before carrying me across the threshold to the place we turned…

I woke this morning when your stubbled chin and its partnered smile (so often the subject   of my affection) grazed my graffitied shoulder with a kiss you wrapped your arms   around me like sunlight peeking through curtains skin smelling like the soap   running through my chest hair last night when you washed…

I rested, naked, as he ran hot water over my body. Gentle hands. Soft and careful across my chest, arms, hands. I thought of you. Desperate, grasping to think of a million other things. You persisted­­—filled with memories I hadn’t remembered. Of being washed in the sink: naked, young, helpless. You must have been happy…

Beneath falling oak leaves and behind the Second Lutheran Church beyond a fuchsia fused fall sunset above Main Street’s hardware store a second-hand ’74 Plymouth is parked and bisected by the early moonlight shadow of the Saturday evening steeple above its interior illuminated by dashboard radio Top 40 tunes softly sent from the transmission towers…