Janine Certo

After Divorce

Then the foot with its haughty

arch becomes hill with a girl.

Run, run, one finger along

the horizon. Then the shin

with its impossible thin skin,

bone and blood becomes

the acacia trunk, the giraffe

bending to drink. Then

the thigh with its shame

and fat glory of alone, this

beach with no name. Then

the sex, a well, well-oiled,

a cave: Cave of Cyprus,

Cave of Calabria, Cave

of Swimmers—human

figures, limbs contorted—

then the solar plexus, a fire

with a nerve and ganglia,

once scrambling the chest

with panic, now becomes

a staid doe, an American

plain. Then the shoulder

extension, the new arm

and trust like a learned

hand. At last, the neck

with its impulse and cord,

flex, and the head turning

around, turning forward,

turning back to the ear

and eye. Who have you

loved? Pick each one up,

the intelligence of stones,

every navel with its land

and animal memory, split

like a fissure through the scar.

---

Janine Certo is the author of four poetry books, including O Body of Bliss, winner of the Longleaf Poetry Prize (2023); and Elixir, winner of the New American Prize and Lauria/Frasca Prize (New American and Bordighera Press, 2021).

next

toc

Tina Cane

Letters From The Sky

When a shell casing from the twenty-one-gun salute at my father's funeral arrives

it will be engraved with his name and relevant dates and given to his next of kin

and when his wife presses it into my hand I will not hold it to my ear to hear waves

breaking like my father's fading drawl a final time on the telephone line I will peer instead

inside its shallow depth to explore its nothingness in search of some residual force or silent

report to insist upon a truth

that war blew apart the man's life to the point

he could barely even watch the news that such a small space should accommodate

a belief as deep as duty is indeed a special kind of magical thinking

for a spent bullet

cannot be anything other than what it is hollow or not all I've got is this ritual and a dad

AWOL for fifty years now finally gone for good

good that I skipped his service

on purpose to be alone with my grief apt that having missed him in life

I should see him now in the sky of my mind drifting like a cloud magical and also good

that he be impervious to bullets flying where energies align with messages beyond my reach

---

Tina Cane is the founder/ director of Writers-in-the-Schools, RI. From 2016-2024, she served as Poet Laureate of Rhode Island where she lives with her husband and three children. Her books include: Once More With Feeling, Body of Work, Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante, and Year of the Murder Hornet.

toc

next

Clayton Bradshaw-Mittal

Duality, Projected

After Angela Ball

Your history begins when your father,

freshly dropped out of community college,

watches you—then two—hold a cat.

You drop it, surely unintentional,

in the driveway of your grandfather’s

gas station (which is named after you).

It is this moment, feline screeching

in the background, that your father

decides you are a serial killer.

At age five, you cry at your gran’s

funeral, an act, which in your pre-queer awakening,

is deemed by your father unmasculine.

In middle school, it was pills on which you choked,

that made you fall asleep in class,

that were supposed to fix you.

In high school, it was absence—

a bright Texas-size void through which

you wandered, fatherless, unhoused.

You learn your father’s history begins when he lines

up his sisters and touches them like barbie

dolls unagented in his presence.

And a therapist asks if this trespass

is what your father, in his haunting guilt, projects

onto you, falsely believing your face a mirror to his own.

And when the war didn’t take you,

Neither did he, instead shifting further,

rejecting what he thinks there might be of himself in you.

---

Clayton Bradshaw-Mittal (they/them) is a queer, previously unhoused veteran. Winner of the Plaza Short Story Prize, their creative work can be found in Story, Fairy Tale Review, F(r)iction, South Carolina Review and elsewhere. Other work appears in The Rumpus, Barrelhouse, and additional journals. They teach creative writing at Gannon University and are the Managing Editor of New Ohio Review.

toc

next