Poems

Love Currency by Sara Gronich

we are born with open hands

palms towards the sky

we give and receive love freely

as if no other currency exists

but through heartbreak

and the puppeteer that twists us

bending us backwards

we quickly turn our hands over

with fists clenched

our rough, hardened knuckles protecting us

from the damage we fear

until we don't recognize love

until we don’t recognize ourselves

yet blue eyes and late texts

stolen glances and shaggy hair

slowly grab hold of our hands

cold skin softened by the warm graze of fingertips

inch by inch

and our palms face the sky once more

as our cheeks turn a warmer shade of rose

we fear our palms will not withstand the forthcoming wounds

but we cannot pull away

for the missed feeling of cool air intertwined with our fingers

and the tender titillation of love currency

so we continue forward indefinitely

with open hands

we are reborn


Courage by Jude Cramer

Is it courage to expose my naked skin

to any man within twenty miles

with a beard and an ounce of personality?

Is it courage to find clearness in the tailspin

and erase him without a fair trial,

praying I’ve undone my own immortality?

Is it courage to tell myself I’m erotic,

tantalizing, beautiful, sensual beyond belief

when the words feel jammed down my throat?

Is it courage to spew them still, so quixotic,

and spend the better part of the night posing in my briefs

less for the likes than just by rote?

Is it courage to meet him at his frat house,

knowing his expectations and attraction

and just realizing how far I’ve flown?

Is it courage to obliterate my bounds

for the sake of his carnal satisfaction,

which I’m meant to accept as my own?

Or is it courage to stay curled up under comforting fluff

and wonder who put the torn condom wrapper in my trash can

because I’ve never even split one’s foil apart?

Is it courage to say that my weighted blanket is enough,

that my body pillow is a perfect proxy for a man

when nothing would feel better than a warm beating heart?

Is it courage to speak it, even without strength,

how fucking scared I am? How is it fair

that everything worth having is within arm’s length

but is just too heavy for me to bear?


Metamorphosis by Christian Thorsberg

a golden shovel poem after Emily Doe *

Submerged in the sluiceway of memory’s moist underbelly, where you

secrete supercuts of seahorses, cache currents of curved tails that don’t

tread water without waking riptides, but pray, will come to know,

in bestial irony, a guilt pregnant as barefoot rain clouds – wash me

ashore in brilliant red waves to dimorphic coasts of eggshells, speak not but

whistle the whimpers of leucistic male cardinals, feathers fading – you’ve

felt their flapping wings now traipsing into sea’s white foam, where a voice has never been. 

Where goes the love of a widowed cocoon, a butterfly the ectoplasm of hope, the inside 

skeletal, a permanent and forgotten evolution. Written in washed over sand, you ask me

as you don’t, a shape-shifting parochial octopus, three hearts nocturnal and

two eyes blind, eight lies swimming and not beached like me. But I grow feet – that’s

now where we find ourselves, a clearing in truth’s patronizing forest, imploring why

the moss refuses to show face in red river or bear its witness as is just, knowing we’re 

stronger without need for antlers, does, the biota of courage with silence-wrapped words, here, 

where you don’t know me, name written in the sun, it blinds you to see her flying today.

* ​Golden Shovel: Takes a line from an admirable piece of writing, and uses each word in the line as an end word in the poem. Reading down the last word of each line reveals the original piece. 

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