Lizzie Derksen
I run around collecting bottles,
folding the chairs up,
and putting the turkey carcass on to boil
in a pot of water and bay leaves. Lucy calls.
Susan can tell her I am not one
to dispense with a bay leaf.
Lizzie Derksen
I take two Ativan and put on an apron.
It’s nine am, I’m home alone,
I am boiling over like a pot of pasta water,
and my date is finally gone.
Lizzie Derksen
Rachel and Susan, gone for all of
two weeks, now back,
claim the city is changed
since they left.
Lizzie Derksen
I crash on my rich friend’s couch in Ritchie,
where the beans are stumbling like
Rachel and I having a fight—I mean
like newborn foals out of the ground.
Thirty-odd years ago
our pre-frontal cortexes lurched into place,
and it turns out there is still everything
to try and understand.
Lizzie Derksen
Something exhausting is in the air.
I’ve started drinking coffee in the afternoon
and I can’t even seem to make myself come.
Jordan Williamson
I do not know what it means
or of the blue station wagon
which carried us, kicking up gravel
over the hill, sun glaring menacingly
into our soft new faces.
Bex Hainsworth
Our parting was genetically predestined.
Two grandparents, my mother; my uncle’s
turned itself inside out at twenty-seven.
It took five years of GP appointments
and physio and scans to determine
that you were the reason I would wake
in the night with a wing of pain
Arushi Rege
amma cuts me fruit / uses this apology / tells me / i’m sorry / as if we’re always whole / amma
tells me / cue up bones / as if watching forensic anthropologists / heals all wounds / jevayala ye /
because coming to eat / erases earlier yells / queen’s necklace calls, mother / it’s saying / forgive
me / seven times / until i’m forgiven / amma hates that i love / (a boy from kerala)
Alexandra McKay
If I could wish one thing
It would be to go to Costco with my parents
I called them today
They were there,
Shopping for broccoli and cheddar dishes,
Roast chickens en masse,
Telling me what they’d discovered
Losing each other in wonderment
Finding each other in the chip aisle
Bryanna Joy
all night we were crossing the ocean
none of us could see
through the dark egg windows
far below us the baleen were
rolling in the deep we
were tired but could not sleep