Stephanie McCarley Dugger
Housebreak

Stephanie McCarley Dugger - Housebreak

Poetry
Stephanie McCarley Dugger’s first collection of poetry, Either Way You’re Done (2017), was published by Sundress Publications. Her chapbook, Sterling (Paper Nautilus, 2015), was winner of the… Read more »
Sara Henning
Letter in the Shape of a Banyan Tree

Sara Henning - Letter in the Shape of a Banyan Tree

Poetry
Sara Henning is the author of View from True North, cowinner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and the 2019 High Plains Book Award. Her latest collection of poems, Terra… Read more »
Francine Witte
My Father in the Front Door

Francine Witte - My Father in the Front Door

Poetry
Francine Witte’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Mid-American Review, and Passages North. Her latest books are Dressed All Wrong for This (Blue Light Press), The… Read more »
Rose Auslander
Praise the wind in your face, the hill rising before you

Rose Auslander - Praise the wind in your face, the hill rising before you

Poetry
Rose Auslander lives on Cape Cod. Obsessed with water, she is the author of the book Wild Water Child, the chapbooks Folding Water, Hints, and The Dolphin in the Gowanus, and poems in the Berkeley… Read more »
Lisa Suhair Majaj
True Lies

Lisa Suhair Majaj - True Lies

Poetry
Lisa Suhair Majaj, a Palestinian-American, is the author of Geographies of Light (Del Sol Press Poetry Prize winner), and poems and essays in many international publications. Her writing has been used… Read more »

Letter in the Shape of a Banyan Tree

Sara Henning

I always felt like a bird blown through the world. I never felt like a tree. —May Swenson 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 one’s legacy. You called me daughter who named animals as if they were children, daughter who knew everything she loved could hurt her—street cats, possums hissing in the dark. For consolation, you dressed me in pink, as if I’d be your perfect girl. But I was tomboy, all 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, Double Dragon in my bean bag chair. Sunlight seethed with me, lasered our duplex windows. Love meant learning to run. Mother, where does it end, this story of us? Nightmares are death still hatching its secret inside of you. 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 talk to you relentlessly, fevered questions about bodies, children, every sacred destruction. Blood that won’t stop. When will you answer me? 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 root and sow. I’m a bird blown through the world. Zeroed from Earth, I will not let you go.
Read more »