Sugared Water issue no. 009
Spring 2025

Contributors

Tim Duffy, B. Fulton Jennes, Lindsay Keller-Madsen, Steph Kleid, Barbara Lawhorn, Melanie H. Manuel, Jessa Queyrouze, Susan Rich, Hannah Yerington, Danielle Weeks, and Elizabeth Wing.

STAFF

Editor : Nicci Mechler
Readers : Kelly Andrews, Mare Johnston, & Robin Turner

tomorrow & tonight & never & now

steph kleid

my invincibility was ripe & gravity
hadn’t started weighing down my tits yet
& I’d just tried coke for the first (and last)
time when they called to tell me
that a tumor the size of a grapefruit
had fastened onto my little sister’s left ovary.
we couldn’t—shouldn’t—didn’t—don’t—
don’t you dare—don’t say the fucking word—
partly for fear that the universe was listening
& partly for fear that she was.
she was 18, freshly minted with a diploma.
I was 25, halfway to mastering something.
both of our lives were dawning on us—
but wait—no, wait—that looks like dusk—
it must be—it must be—it can’t be—
a bulletproof person doesn’t think
about potentially fatal gunshot wounds
until she has to tourniquet an entire
body, an entire being, an entire person—
my sister—my sister—my little sister—
fuck my youth. fuck my ego.
let her make art & try shrooms
& tie her chunky black shoes tomorrow.
let her learn how to use her chest
(it’s better than mine anyway)
& get hopeless men to buy her drinks.
let her float in the atlantic ocean & fly
in an airplane & have dad’s french toast
for breakfast a million, a billion more times.
haven’t I lived enough? isn’t 25 years enough?
take my youth. take my ego. take my vest.
coke wasn’t that great anyway & I love you.

Steph Kleid (she/her) is a New Jersey-based poet and writer. She received both her BA in English and MFA in Creative Writing from Manhattanville University where she is now a lecturer of academic writing. Her work can be found in Sinking City and Creation Magazine and is forthcoming in Sunflowers at Midnight. Steph is drawn to narrative poetry and stories that explore femininity, the body, and love in its many forms. She spends as much time as possible "down the shore," exploring small towns, and trying every local coffee shop she passes.

screwing up the nerve

Barbara lawhorn

I’m vacillating between sex thoughts and money thoughts and sexandmoney thoughts when my work nemesis arrives at the public pool wearing a neon green banana hammock. I’m used to seeing him in black turtlenecks, the cliched professorial suit jackets with corduroy patches, khaki pants shiny from over ironing and Italian loafers. I hide under my wide brimmed straw hat and behind my giant fly-eyed sunglasses and wrap my cover-up tightly around me like a shield of invisibility. He is with his partner, a Religious Studies scholar who looks twelve, but is what? 46? 50? You really have to be close to see how her skin is going crepe paper around the eyes and her neck has a turkey waddle. In stealth mode, I observe the moon paleness of his rounded potbelly below ribs I can count.

I’m here with my 14-year-old son and his girlfriend. He’s in the fever-pitched puberty race towards a man body. Jay still lets me hug him before bed, but he’s detaching so hard I can almost hear the Velcro ripping sound of it. Jay and Ashlee are in the 5 feet deep area so I watch their heads bobbing. Their noses are touching and lips are moving. Ashlee’s arms are draped around his neck and every so often she whispers in his ear. She wears a tasteful green bikini and her skin is so new it hurts my eyes.

I lift the book I am not reading a little higher and scan the pool. I love observing. People watching. Sitting still and doing nothing. I love driving too because no one can expect anything from me. I can’t unload the dishwasher. I can’t cook a meal. I can only drive. I love driving Jay and his friends because they forget I’m there and I get to peer into their reality beyond dinner plate conversations. I get to hear how they really talk.

The chlorinated water catches light and fractures the pool into panes of glass. The wind catches the manes of the red maples and white oaks in the park that grows towards the pool, and grass grows through the lower links in the fence. Two dragonflies, in midfuck, land on the triangle of my exposed thigh. The bored lifeguards twirl their whistles. When I was a kid, I came here every day. I brought a book then too, and read during adult swim, in the shade of the lifeguards. They had to climb up to their perches. I alternated between Chris and Julie. Julie had a red moped, thin blonde hair she kept chin length and permed, and freckles all over her body. Her pubic hair was red. I knew this because she’d swing one leg over the metal frame of her guard chair sometimes. Chris was my friend Chad’s older brother and he looked like the blonde actor from CHIPS, except as a swimmer who specialized in the butterfly, you know what I’m saying? Those shoulders. That tiny waist. He was 21. Julie had just graduated from high school.

I was 12, and getting used to my new body, how the world was responding to me as a woman, but my parents treated me like a child. My friends were changing too, and I felt on the outside as we headed for junior high. That summer my life was swimming, reading books, eating Doritos, and typing stories and poems on my dad’s old electric typewriter to the cadence of the box fan in my window. I was a good listener though and Chris and Julie would let me in on their observations of the pool’s clientele while my wet thumbs left dime sized splotches on the library book pages. Briefly, I’d feel on the inside looking out, and I’d try to see what they saw.

Our favorite person to judge was this tall, skinny man who tanned, lathering on the baby oil until he glistened, and then stood, snapping the ass of his gray speedo. During adult swim, he’d take to the low and high dives with a grave elegance. He was the dive coach at the university and taught the Alexander Technique. I know because I screwed up the nerve to disrupt his tanning.

I stood over him, and my shadow was cast over his shiny back. “How’d you learn to do that?” I asked.

“Do what?” He didn’t turn his head or look up at me or change his position.

“Sluice through the water. Dive so loverly.”

“Loverly? Is that a word?”

“It’s my word. I made it up.”

He turned on his side, and propped himself up on one elbow. What an Adam’s apple he had! It looked as though a large, jagged rock had gotten lodged in his throat, but his voice was a pleasure. “What a strange swimsuit,” he remarked.

It was true. It had loud stripes of yellow and orange and red alternating with white stripes, and all over the front was a huge face of a smiling Donald Duck in a sailor’s hat. It was so French Cut my hip bones jutted out. I loved everything about it.

“I’m a strange kid,” I said, “but I been learning from watching you dive. You look like I imagined Ichabod Crane to look if you had a sausage curl of a pigtail at the nape of your neck, tied smartly with a ribbon.”

“While you are the first to remark so colorfully, you are not the first to make the comparison. It was the cartoon. It seems everyone has seen it.” He sat up, swung his long legs over the side and dug into a large canvas bag. He handed me a business card. It read: Ivan Minski/Diving/Alexander Technique/ Comportment and Etiquette.

“Someday, I’ll have myself a business card too,” I said.

He sighed. “Will you, now?” He asked, but I knew better than to answer. And so, it was that I became his student. I watched and practiced and lived for Ivan’s critiques.

Of course, I was in love with Chris who was studying Philosophy even though his parents wanted him to go into business. He loved Star Trek like my mom, who let me watch with her as long as I didn’t talk. I was in love with Julie too, I just didn’t kiss my pillow thinking of her, just more that I wanted to be her. And although I was preoccupied with watching Ivan’s every move during adult swim, I understood they were interrogating me about each other. I really understood when I was waiting for my mom to pick me up, and I saw Chris on the back of Julie’s moped, his huge arms engulfing her so they looked like some kind of alien insect. He said something into the delicate shell of her ear and I watched her laugh, tossing her head back, and though I could not hear it, I knew all of its curvatures and contours. When they started filling the blank page of me with what was between them, stopping short and dwindling off into silence, I hung there within its hammock knowing something had changed. When I asked what, Julie said, “You’re nothing but a kid. I can’t tell you. You wouldn’t understand. Something things are for the grown-ups.”

“Grown-ups, my derriere,” I said. “You’re playing pretend and having a summer fling. I read. I know how this one goes.”

“You’re playing pretend if you think Chris cares one whit about you. He’s humoring you just like he does his kid brother. Go stick your nose in a book. Go dive with the other weirdo.”

I moved to the deep end and dangled my feet there, while Ivan dove and I did everything I could think of not to cry. I was determined to be a solitary, elegant, and truly aloof being like him. Maybe he was weird, but he wasn’t ordinary, and he was entirely himself. If the world didn’t admire that, so be it. I did. I turned all of my attention to diving and I took to walking with my back straight, shoulders back, vertebrae stacked, neck long and gaze forward.

I don’t know what I looked like jack knifing, front and back flipping, and executing one and a halves, but I know how I felt. Free. On the last day of summer, at the last adult swim, I followed Ivan to the boards. Chris was lifeguarding the deep end and Julie was on break, leaning against the base of his chair. I mounted the three steps of the ladder. Ivan climbed the high dive. Julie called to me, but I gazed ahead, ignoring her. I was inside the home of my body, preparing to dive. From a great distance I heard Chris blowing his whistle. I took three careful, measured strides, bounced deeply at the end, and Greg Luganised that shit with a two and a half. I swam to the side and climbed out as I imagined an Olympic diver would. Chris and Julie were calling to me, but I looked up at Ivan, and he clapped silently and slowly. He nodded with a great solemnity. And I watched him complete a simple dive so perfectly my eyes welled up.

Julie yelled, “You need a new suit. And it needs to be lined. Everyone can see everything. And weird Speedo dude might be an adult, but you aren’t. Don’t try that again. Rules are rules and you aren’t above them.” She grabbed Chris’ ankle with her hand, then coasted it up and down his calf, slowly, watching me as I watched her. Walking back to my towel, I employed the Alexander Technique, aware I was basically naked.

My work nemesis is my work nemesis because from his ego balloon perch, he looks down on me. I do not have enough or the right credentials, by his estimation, and so he thinks his downward gaze is hurtful, rather than hilariously ridiculous. In synch, all of the lifeguards blow their whistles for adult swim. Hidden, sweat rolling down my back, I watch him pontificate in full paragraphs to his partner. She rolls over on her belly and promptly falls asleep. He gets up and walks toward the diving board. This is a wonder to me. I watch him dive. He thinks he is really good. I can tell. It’s the weird swagger. A certain boomeranging of his hips as he leans on the railing. The way he shakes his long, thinning hair like someone in a commercial. There is something about seeing him without his glasses that makes me feel like I have never really seen him before. He’s scrawny, except for his little, rounded potbelly, and his arms dangle a little too long so it’s hard not to think of a chimpanzee knuckle dragging. His partner rouses, adjusts the back of her chair so she can watch. He is on the low dive and he waves to her, then blows a kiss, and points to her like he is dedicating this dive to her. Ah! Ivan would decimate his form and humble this man. My work nemesis emerges from the pool, climbing the ladder in his electric green, slightly obscene Speedo. Suddenly, I see only a tall, thin, naked boy-child. And I remember what else happened after Julie yelled so cruelly to me. I was silenced, yes, without words, but my hands found the freedom within the nucleus of the dive I had just executed, and from across the pool I flipped double birds and held them until Chris’ whistle was an alarm. I walked with manufactured elegance and gathered my bag and wrapped myself in a towel dress. I tossed my hair, and yelled, “Later, turds!” I believed I would never return.

On the ramp down to the locker rooms, Ivan caught me, and placed a hand on my shoulder. I looked up into Ivan’s face and what passed between us was the wordless understanding of being wounded without being crushed, of not knowing our place which meant relentlessly pursuing discovery outside and within ourselves. Here I am at 47, hell bent on homecoming—to myself. Maybe my work nemesis felt still as I did at 12, and all of his academic assholery is pretentious presentation and posturing to mask what is under it all—the vulnerability of a scrawny, soaking wet human being.

Fuck that. I close my book, toss my straw hat, discard my sunglasses, and peel off my coverall, letting it puddle at my bare feet. I stretch and crack my knuckles. Then I walk, I glide silk like Ivan taught me, tossing my too long-too blonde for my age hair. My bikini is red with white polka dots and I got the top too small so my cleavage spills a bit. All my inked skin sings and all my tattoos tell a still unfolding story. I intersect his path from the ladder, but he is invisible to me, and I am focused, I am already tasting the bone and muscle freedom of flipping, the weightlessness of water. I climb the ladder and pause, sheltering my eyes to look out. My son and his girlfriend sit on the pool’s edge, legs in the water up to their knees. My son makes a heart with his hands. He has always loved this about me. He has always sat on the edge and called out my next dive. Incredibly, they sit right in front of my nemesis’ partner, and look, there my nemesis is. Standing. Stock still. Like me. Encapsulated in this moment, only this moment, and I ask my body, “What freedom shall we choose? How, this time, shall we fly?”

Barbara Lawhorn teaches at Western Illinois University. She’s into community literacy work, walking her amazing dog, Banjo, running, eating pie, and finding the wild places, within herself and outside in the world. She lives joyfully in the Midwest with her favorite creative endeavors ever—sons, Mars and Jack.

UPTURNED

melanie h. manuel

“where would they get buried?” he wondered.... the relatives of the dead mourned for them, surrounded by the public who had no knowledge of what happened. the festivities of the fair continued around this pocket of grief.” —unnamed narrator, Bontoc Eulogy (1995)

my body knows its own dying.
knows its history. without

having lived it yet. my tita often
reminds me to say excuse me—

to dead lands—passing through—
as a form of saving ourselves.

it is not enough to say our dead
never made it back home. forests

do not scare me, not its
scattering beetles, or the poison

ivy, not even the butterflies
i know as our ghosts in another

form. what scares me is all that’s left.
whatever that is. i dig

my hands in the cool damp earth,
carve out hollows—let its heft sit

in my palms—

Melanie H. Manuel is a Filipina American poet. She obtained her MFA in poetry from San Diego State University. She currently teaches at American River College as an adjunct professor in the English department. Her work has been published by North American Review, Grist: A Literary Journal of Arts, Los Angeles Review, and Bellevue Review, with more forthcoming. Her debut chapbook, in storyboard, is now out with Bottlecap Press. 

Adamah (Bodies in winter)

Hannah Yerington

I was once nestled in the greenhouse
of your limbs, curled up
in the fog of your cheekbones.
Today, I find God in a flock of moths
a tree stripped bare,
I breathe out clouds.
My hands are dry and bleeding,
I know love in abundance
but not every body hurts
in the winter.
In the frost, your chest expands,
you take long walks and revel
in the silence of faded
orange, trunks hollowed
by past storms.

Hannah Yerington is a poet and the Bolinas Poetry Camp for Girls director. She lives in Washington with her gentleman dog, Paddington, and her little imp puppy, Poe. When she’s not writing, she’s drinking tea or talking to flowers. Minerva Rising Press published her first chapbook, Sheologies, in Spring 2023.

i gave my husband prayer flags for father’s day

b. fulton jennes

He’s Buddhist now, self-taught but sincere.
Meditates with the dog, carries spiders outdoors
in cupped hands, reads The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
I liked the world better before bardos—
worry I’ll get lost in the chaotic maze of dharmata—
but perhaps he’ll come, whisper clues for escape,
like the time sudden-night blanketed us on Overlook Trail
at Zion—a hundred-foot cliff on one side, a mile of rocks
and roots to trip us ahead, only moonlight to guide us.
But I followed his voice and arrived safe at the car,
thankful for the dome light, thankful he was there
with me to laugh at our hubris, setting out so late.
I give him a string of prayer flags for Father’s Day.
We have no idea what they say, but we tie them between
two blight-killed beech saplings behind the house.
They’re the only two trunks the rope spans without slack,
so we each knot one side, each claim our own dead tree.
His is sturdier, but they’ll both fall come winter.

B. Fulton Jennes’ poems have appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies, including CALYX, Comstock Review, Rust and Moth, SWWIM, and Tupelo Quarterly. Her collection Blinded Birds (Finishing Line) received the 2022 International Book Award for a poetry chapbook. FLOWN was published by Porkbelly Press in 2024.

zombie club

tim duffy

In an A-frame Chinese restaurant on Route One, my father
glows uranium green and celebrates 1978 with pineapple and rum,
apricot brandy, and lime. My mother does not drink.
She drives the van under the moonlight and billboard glow
while her drunk friends and husband roll in the back. When
they laugh, she laughs. Even when my father
says he will die young from all the radiation he has absorbed
at work. I picture him like Homer Simpson tossing green rods
over Geiger counters. Tonight, it’s glass after glass
of cold tropical booze under the comedian’s stage banter.
Too-sweet chicken and stale broccoli, the slow stitching
of the past and future. If I wrote a poem on how to survive
this would be it. One more glass of just enough of what
could kill you, but doesn’t. The radioactive potential of the hope
of more years to pass. A mutation. Some stubborn life.

the rime of the grand mariner, or, my mother at dolores’s side

tim duffy

The news of her death came with the taste of oranges preserved in alcohol.
The flavor, like a ghost, haunting gently with an invisible vapor.
We had come to celebrate, Ann and I, and after champagne
and the rest of the wine, the waiter brought the massive snifter.
I remembered how happiness and grief blend in a liquid combination,
impossible to sever. My parents told me a story about a man out to dinner
with them in their youth, a large group. He resented having to split the bill
evenly. He had barely eaten, so he demanded a Grand Mariner from the waiter.
They all laughed. He was ashamed. I don’t know if they ever saw him again.
I don’t know his name. My mother is waiting. The orange is still with her.
It is so luxurious to preserve the memory of the delicious before it slips away.
The orange learns to survive, invisible, an intoxicating visitation.
Where was that? I text my mother at her aunt’s side. The Scotch and Sirloin,
she replies, then, I’m with her now; then, her breathing has changed; then, she’s gone.
The Grand Mariner of the Scotch and Sirloin sails through youth, no kids yet
in 1977. He can only laugh before the journey turns wicked, a laugh
that outlives so much of the beauty of the world. He is ocean-wet as
he pounds at the door of the party we hold as our loved ones die.
When our ship comes in, it won’t matter who we find to listen,
we’ll tell the story, each word a reminder of how we still breathe.

Tim Duffy is a poet and teacher living in Connecticut. His poems have recently appeared in Salt Hill, South Florida Poetry Journal, Pleiades, and elsewhere. He has three children, a dog, and a fish.

Iracebeth deconstructed

Lindsay Kellar-Madsen

Her crown is forged
in a deep, dark lake
drowned by quiet

rivers, easy-flowing.
A flush of starlings
spill from the roost

on her mother’s back.
Raven-winged scapulas
seed curses in her wake.

Iracebeth deadheads
spent peonies,
tends to budding

calluses and stains
fretted sleeves
reassembling yolk—

rituals to elude
eager mallets hammering
red meat in her chest.

My body: shuttered house

Lindsay Kellar-Madsen

Every December, the wind blows
as snow piles past the door frame.
Animals sift through drifts with diamonds
threaded through rusty coats. Did you know
bears lose 30% of themselves every winter?

So wooden boards are fixed to blistered
frames—so critter claws won’t slice summer
screens or topple tall kerosene lanterns.
Because what if fire snaked through the asphalt
shingles my father nailed and sweat to the roof?
What if we burned down the best of our childhoods?

Our ramshackle reprieve—where even the worst of us
can escape a nasty divorce and murmur over a thumping
card table, salvaged from the dump. Come April,
we peel back the plywood to welcome spring
zephyrs, who rub the sleepy seed heads
of last year's Black-eyed Susans.

We wipe out the cupboards and dust off
the curling mysteries, forgotten here
last October. We trim the wicks, rake
the pine needles, and swallow the whole
dark lake, when we must.

Lindsay Kellar-Madsen writes compulsively in rare sleeves of time. She lives in the Danish countryside with her husband and four children, who only wear shoes when necessary. Her poems have also found homes with The Shore, Humana Obscura, and Snapdragon Journal. Her latest children's book is Meet the Wild (Little Otter Press, 2023).

HYphae

Danielle Weeks

Mushrooms growing out of her hands, red
caps peace in what lies under hens
pecking the wet earth for swollen worms
what happened here scoop out the ribs
with a spoon use oil and heat, stir a finger
in the soil, broken nails keeping black
at their centers be careful not to touch her
or you will become her flipped in the mirror
of a particle parallel stems growing up, out
from the unseen fruit the fractal body

A HISTORY OF WOMEN

Danielle Weeks

Unmoving in the red chair again, keys
in my fist. There will be no end to days

like this: the express mail getting soggy
on the front porch, the ceiling’s eyeless

blink. Driving home, I ran over a deer
that had a young woman’s head. I know

no one believes me. My skin still feels
the blood and grass knotted in her hair

from when I knelt on the road, my arms
holding all of her I could. I wasn’t enough.

I need more arms. I need a way to keep
moving. My mother once told me a story

about a girl who grew antlers in her sleep,
and all that changed was how she walked

through doors and how she put on clothes.
I didn’t know she was telling me the truth.

When my own antlers stemmed, I thought
everyone would say What happened to her?

behind their hands, their waters parting
around me like a stone. I wrapped my tines

in blue fabric. I kept my eyes on the cracks
buckling the sidewalk. When I got trapped

in a low-hanging tree, I waited for anything
but the patient hands that unwrapped me

from that place, the soft and so-slow touch
on my arm that said, I know it’s not enough.

PSEUDOMORPH

Danielle Weeks

Out of nowhere: a man across the street
whose voice carries
familiar violence, and all I have are these
soft human places
that can only take so much before they rip
and drain yellow.
I have dreamed about the animal defenses:
the poison glands,
the hypnotic flesh blending into the water,
the bone claws.
One of these days, I’ll look down and find
a bile-black shape
shedding herself from between my legs,
my chemical alarm
made solid, sticky with phlegm and blood.
Little false body
that goes out in the world for me when I can’t,
when my skin
is humming like a fading fluorescent light.
I never wanted
to make another body that could feel pain.
She is nerveless
and fluid enough to not care when someone
displaces the air
in her. If I could, I would give her everything
I have grown
tired of, this electric tissue talking so loudly
all the time.

Danielle Weeks earned her MFA in poetry through Eastern Washington University’s creative writing program. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in The Missouri Review, Pleiades, and Whale Road Review, among others. She is a poetry editor for Crab Creek Review.

BEES

Jessa Queyrouze

The first warm day in April, the bees come back.
On the high siding above the bricks, the slats
are freckled thickly black with bees.

I can step outside and hear it now, a hum
like gathering breath. Not quite mechanical,
somehow flesh. Swollen. Buzzing. Heavy
as my own clenched chest.

I can’t go out. They seep into the house.
I hold my breath, waiting for the catch.

In dreams, my mother, coming back from death—
unvoiced, and humming with distress. I’ve changed
so much. The things I’ve dropped or lost,
the rituals I’ve skipped. That hitch

in the plan. Behind the walls some ancient wire
now is kinked and sparking. A ghost
of smoke, of smolder. Or a leak
that’s licking at the subfloor, somewhere.
A slick, a bruise of black. Unseen. Seeping.

You’re meant to tell the bees about a death.
My mother, looking back—her own mind at the end
collapsed, that hive of glowing gold, gutted.
Each synapse thick and soured, sticky with regret.

There was a darkness, lurking. Unseen sweet rot,
some seething warmth behind the walls. Jaw deep,
the root—a cavity, eaten steadily away.
Some skip we stepped. Some flaw
left to fester. Some slow disaster.

Outside, the bees have found the crack
in last year’s sealant. There is no shoring up.
On my own thigh a nest of cells, gone sour. The scar
a waxy ridge, a thick reminder.

There’s no holding back the flood. My hands
look like my mother’s. This house, this body built from hers,
these bees, persistent as the ticking of a clock.

Jessa Queyrouze is a poet and writer in Louisiana. Her poems have recently appeared in Smartish Pace and Poetry South. Her short fiction from the Spring 2024 edition of Waxwing was nominated for Sundress Publications' Best of the Net.

Dove Dock

Susan Rich

I ask my friend your name, noting your viridian physique,
your hipsway, your swagger. Across the meadowlands
you stand among friends while I draw notes on my pages,
my private field guide. Oh, it’s been so long since this

rewilding found me, the chemistry of our gaze
leading me onward to new intimacies. How
have we not met before? Between black hawthorns
and berry cane, your ginormous leaves tempt me

like a fantasy novel, a puzzle piece, a green flame.
Honestly? I cannot stop looking at you, Butterbur.
May I call you Dove Dock? Colt’s Foot? I like you best
in early evening, tucked in wonderment. Traveler

of Japanese Islands, resident of the Swiss Alps, what
memory do you keep of other continents—
places you never asked to leave. Now I watch you thrive
in disturbed sites, cure migraines and surface wounds— 

I’m certain you’ll be an attentive lover,
coax our landscape of little deaths. In warm
weather, you’ll wrap my butter just right—remain cool.
My passion for you surprising, all-new.

THE LAST TIME

Susan Rich

we sit across from the ocean.
Almost. Kissing. The last time

we will touch each other.
He bends toward the ground.

I’ve been bragging about you.

And in half a millisecond,

I know the next unsuspecting one
has been secured for his bed.  

And after the sex, which I imagine

paled in comparison with ours—
he untangled himself from her legs—

stepped towards the small bookcase

to the Blue Atlas and read out the inscription:
Everlasting—under his breath

listening to the wolf moon—

howl through
the unforgiven nights.

Susan Rich is the author of eight books including Blue Atlas (Red Hen Press) and Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems (Salmon Poetry). In addition, she is co-editor of Demystifying the Manuscript (Two Sylvias Press). Her work appears in: New England Review, Ploughshares, and The Slowdown with Major Jackson. Her poems have earned awards from Peace Corps Writers, PEN USA, Times Literary Supplement London. Birdbrains: A Lyrical Guide to Washington State Birds, is forthcoming from Raven Chronicles.

CUTBANK

elizabeth wing

rib of the river gathering into depth
where i strip down & strech up. enchanted place, except for the horseflies
this place is bigger than your bitterness & I am bigger than your picture of me
and you do not know how I was the foxwalker, how the children asked
to hold my hand. nothing of the salamanders we found curled in the duff,
of the dereleict ward painted neon by our dreams
you know nothing of how they brought me up, cheek pressed close against my
father's wool sweater, a book of extinct animals open between us,
how gentleness begot gentleness. how it gets done the same with no yelling.
how it is entirely possible. how water carved this place.

Elizabeth Wing is a writer, trail worker, and occasional puppeteer based in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in venues such as The West Marin Review, Lucky Jefferson, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and Outlook Springs.