*Trigger Warning: the next poem mentions child sexual abuse*
your dad should come with a trigger warning
Hannah Kludy
it’s a sunday and you’re watching football at your parent’s house
eating chili packed with cheddar cheese and saltines
your team is winning and you say i bet
my neighborhood will be losing it right about now
your dad says be careful
a woman not six blocks from you was dragged
from her porch while reading a book
and raped in her own backyard
you think holy shit
here i am eating chili and that’s what you fucking say to me
carry your mace he says like you ever get to forget
you want to ask him if you should stop reading books outside too
but you can’t
instead you’re with that woman
head pressed into manicured lawn
your bookmark lost somewhere between the porch and your back gate
heavy breathing in your ear
your dad says be careful you hear
wind chimes ringing and dogs barking just three yards away
Hannah Kludy writes most mornings and edits for Nocturne Magazine. Her work has been published in magazines such as Neuro Logical Literary Magazine, Sledgehammer Lit, and Variety Pack. Follow her on Twitter at @KludyHannah.
what is not named
(or, Lady Macbeth on the rag)
Devon Ora
I check my phone after Act III
to find my brother has taken his wife
to the emergency room for a CAT scan
please pray, he says, and the ghost of myself
rises, accuses me of the treason
of agnosticism, which is the word
for when you no longer have words with God
(spell check chides,
do you mean Agnus Dei?)
I was once accused of being a witch
by a man of God who feared
a book written by a woman
this is a story I tell at parties
to remind myself of the stakes
at curtain, from a dry stage
the dead rise and bow
forgoing applause I check for news
who would it satisfy,
the amen I can't say?
heeding my body’s small voice
I reach inside myself where once
something divine almost spoke
a comfort, somehow:
this handful of hot blood
Devon Ora teaches writing in the Mountain West and is still an undercover queer in Bibleland. You can find her work in Contrary Magazine. Follow her on twitter here and instagram here.
Full Arms
Angeline Schellenberg
The gum-smacking receptionist who lets it slip
that the embryo in the ultrasound is just right
for six weeks gestation; I’ve been pregnant for twelve.
The maternity nurse with the voice like a snare drum—
not boy or girl: tissues decomposing—
as she stretches a sheet across the bed.
The anesthetic dream of a tiny blonde
scaling cloud-shaped arms.
The nervous intern who misses
my vein, flooding the flesh
around my elbow with labour-inducing fluid.
The swelling that never
touched my belly.
Angeline Schellenberg’s collection of linked poems about raising children on the autism spectrum, Tell Them It Was Mozart (Brick Books, 2016), won three Manitoba Book Awards and was a finalist for a ReLit Award. In 2019, she published three chapbooks and was nominated for The Pushcart Prize and Arc Poetry Magazine’s Poem of the Year. Angeline hosts Speaking Crow—Winnipeg’s longest-running poetry open mic. Her latest book is Fields of Light and Stone (University of Alberta Press, 2020). She enjoys talking to dogs and eating other people’s baking. angelineschellenberg.wordpress.com