Mark Mitchell
Foreign Hand

Mark Mitchell - Foreign Hand

Poetry
Mark J. Mitchell studied writing at UC Santa Cruz under Raymond Carver, George Hitchcock, and Barbara Hull. His work has appeared in various periodicals over the last thirty-five years as well as the… Read more »
Jane O. Wayne
If Mourning

Jane O. Wayne - If Mourning

Poetry
Jane O. Wayne is the author of four books of poetry, the latest of which is The Other Place You Live (Mayapple Press, 2010). A poem of hers along with an interview appeared in Catherine Rankovic’s… Read more »
Mitchell Untch
It’s Summer This Dream

Mitchell Untch - It’s Summer This Dream

Poetry
Mitchell Untch has been published in The Los Angeles Review, New Millennium Writers Contest, The Monadnock Anthology, Nimrod Intl., The Wisconsin Review, Out of Ours, Aurorean, The Unrorean… Read more »
J.R. Tappenden
R is for Rhoda Consumed by a Fire

J.R. Tappenden - R is for Rhoda Consumed by a Fire

Poetry
J.R. Tappenden is the founding editor of Architrave Press. She earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Missouri – St. Louis where she also served as the university’s first Poet Laureate.… Read more »
Colleen Abel
Remake: The Kiss

Colleen Abel - Remake: The Kiss

Poetry
Colleen Abel is the author of Housewifery, a chapbook (dancing girl press, 2013). A former Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow, her work has appeared in numerous venues including The Southern Review,… Read more »
Jennifer Givhan
Ritual With Fish Water

Jennifer Givhan - Ritual With Fish Water

Poetry
Jennifer Givhan was a PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellow and a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship recipient, as well as the 2013 DASH Literary Journal Poetry Prize winner, an… Read more »
Stephanie Lenox
The Take This Job and Shove It Ode

Stephanie Lenox - The Take This Job and Shove It Ode

Poetry
Stephanie Lenox is the author of the poetry collection Congress of Strange People (Airlie Press) and the poetry chapbook The Heart That Lies Outside the Body (Slapering Hol Press). Poems from a… Read more »

Remake: The Kiss

Colleen Abel

Again, we fuck
to a soundtrack:
Baby Einstein’s Classic

Lullabies. The plink
and wretched plonk
of toy piano,

tinny synthed cello
buzzing Die Moldau
or Pachelbel’s syrupy

trill. The baby
won’t sleep deeply
without it, wakes

in the silence
at the slightest
sound: a moan

or gasp, inane
words we murmur
to each other.

So we go
soundless. After, we
exhaust, the blear

of not-quite-
Mozart casting us
toward sleep, bodies

fused in this:
something close, though
not-quite-bliss.
Read more »