gypsophila
Arielle Tipa
up the stairs
it goes again.
why couldn't we
have quiet children.
a boy with
orange peel
and playtime
or a girl born
in ribbons,
mouthful of gateau.
with each passing moon
i pray for
one.
Arielle Tipa is a writer / poet who lives near a haunted lake in New York. She is the Founding Editor of Occulum and author of Daughter-Seed (Empty Set Press, 2019).
Twitter: @sadflowerpoems
Instagram: @arielletipa
Website:arielletipa.com
Sounds like Fornication
Cathy Carlisi
I
But it’s a spider scuttling
down my arm, a thread of web
breaking across my face.
A type of parenthesia,
sensations with no cause
say the men who have studied women’s health
hardly at all. Tactile hallucination
like the clitoris. In the 1800s,
they removed it to cure hysteria.
In the 1600s, called “the devil’s teat,”
they used it to find witches.
Anatomically studied in 2009
with its first 3D model.
Formication; from the Latin,
“formica,” ant. It can feel like insects
crawling underneath your skin.
II
New studies, by women, say formication
comes from hormone receptors under the skin
disrupted with changes in estrogen.
Estrogen makes women peace keepers,
sex givers, pregnant. When it decreases,
women can become less submissive,
less tolerant, less compliant.
Formica—the counter top my mother
prepared thousands of meals upon.
Cathy is President of the Americas at BrightHouse, where she helped found the Purpose Movement in business. She is a widely published poet and has exhibited her paintings in individual and group shows. She has gone piranha fishing in the Amazon, survived a two-day 150km bike race with a night camping at the Jack Daniel’s distillery, and got married in Rome with a Papal Blessing. She lives in Atlanta with her husband Joe, and daughter Lia.
Amulet
Janet MacFadyen
Down the long driveway
Snow splatting in soft baseballs
A dark van rolls and yaws like a whale
Inside: a blonde woman and child crying
They are no one I know
I only know who I know
The man at the steering wheel peers through one cleared square of windshield
I know that scowl
Snow pelts the sides of the van which is now slabbed in it like blubber
I am running behind, blubbering
The sliding door is ajar, the child looks back
I would get in but I can’t run fast enough and besides
snow is as heavy as cardiac arrest, blood pooling, the motor sputtering
My father is driving into the storm My father
has always been leaving, always drowning
The steel gray van slides out from between my thighs
No one is surprised
There is the stop sign at the end
There is the traffic signal spinning on its broken wires
I hang it around my neck, a blinking amulet
I don't know why
I don't know why
Janet MacFadyen is the author of five poetry books, with a new collection, State of Grass, due out from Salmon Poetry. When she's not writing about rocks, she's writing about hunger, dirt, the body, dreamscapes, and power. She was a writing fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and is the managing editor of Slate Roof Press.
You can find her at www.slateroofpress.com or https://www.facebook.com/slateroofpress/