Paper Houses

A wasp forges its home along the knife’s edge
of a metal eave outside a kitchen window that looks out

onto the pomelo tree that only bears fruit every fourth year
but blossoms the first week each February filling the three rooms

of my apartment with the scent of oranges; I came here
after my son left home and moved in with his girlfriend

after my husband left to live with a woman he worked for;
as the winter weeks pass I watch the paper wasp work

through the shield of a single pane of glass
it was beautiful, the way its stinger appeared sharper

under the sun’s serrated light, how its body seemed brighter
after feeding on other insects and fruit nectar

how the colony it was constructing out of pulp
extruded from broken branches and empty boxes

would collapse and be abandoned by autumn,
like chewing up the rotted wood of a fence post

was as simple as biting into a lemon-

By Michel O’Hara

Biography:

Michel O’Hara is a poet and photographer living in Los Angeles, CA. She is currently completing her B.A. in Liberal Studies, Creative Writing at Antioch University Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in gallery shows and photography exhibitions across the U.S. and was included in the photography anthology “Personal Narrative”. Currently she is an editor at the literary journal Two Hawks Quarterly.

The Future, Greeting Majority Members of the Supreme Court

Believe me
when I say

I will lick the bones clean

I will suck every last succulent  drop   of marrow dry

My tongue

running along femurs and
scapula         and vertebrae

Time    hindsight    it will make an excellent garnish

Before each meal my lips split in a prayer
as much as a curse as much as

a prophecy for your legacy      Do you wish to know it?

My tongue will shine as if blood-dipped gold
a martyr’s tongue a poet’s tongue a God’s tongue

Years after you’re gone it will find you and your vows
and carve a savory damnation into your calcified remains

Believe me when I say

I will make an Eden of your decomposing
history your final regards

I will make for my children a language cast with the graveyard dirt
that holds you still and silent

In this life       your limbs will bloat with greed
and pride and all those sins
tattooed behind your eyes for easy practice

But in the next

In the next every particle of you   every hair   and tooth

will become dust       only the blood on your once-wringing
hands vaguely calling out from the past

Believe me when I say I am coming and
I am famished.

By Daniel Brennan

Odyssey of Hunger

Flesh of my Flesh        Son of Saturn

        Under the afternoon    

                                   sun      the altar can be 

wherever you kneel.        You ply yourself before

                     the August heat   

        starved       mouth-open    tongue-swollen

                  like a calf to the harvest of cornflowers,

like a worm to the rot of the swamp.

                         God prefers the hungry because we are

the only creatures that      kill   to  kill        yet you    ran

from the dry earth of      slaughter   as

                   fast as your    father    fled from faith.

             It is summer after all     and  you can

eat  every lover you    held       but you cannot

                run      from what  you are

                  the same way you

cannot forget your

                  hunger.     So you

stand    in the   dry crops       of the land

                   to gut the belly of fate

and glut   yourself on the skins     of your

sons               because you are

    devoted to tragedy 

                you are devoted    to

your bloodcurse.

            The same way your   mother was

devoted to       redeem you   

               when she     sold    all her gold for

your manhood.             Look at you now,

what a shame of a man you have become  

      sated      mouth-closed    tongue-sunken

You have become what you

                have always wanted

to be;  the all devourer,

            destroyer of

 the sun.        

By Mimi Evangeline

Bittersweet Summer

Sweet taste of summer, still on my tongue
the green wooden door slapping shut as I ran
toward Chrissie’s postage stamp yard, yelling,

come out & play & as young girls we’d abandon our bikes
on the sidewalk to climb up trees, hang upside down to make long shadows
then turn restless, sprint around back with pickle jars to catch bees

nested in bushes & later carefully unscrew the lids,
drop them on the ground & run as fast as our legs would carry us.
Blood-sisters, we pricked our fingers, rubbing them together in ritual.

That summer her older brother, brought home from the factory
the largest box of pop-it beads & for weeks we popped & un-popped
bracelets, belts, necklaces in patterns of lavender, soft yellow, faint pink, until

one day she knocked on my door, announced, my mother died, I have to move away
& how a fist caught in my throat on that warm summer day & how, still
that first taste of loss, forever bitter, forever sits on my tongue.

By Louisa Muniz

Reverence For What Was

I dream of you still
in blackberry fields
caught in the brambles
laughing at the sky

The sky, laughing back at you
deep, rolling thunder from the throat
rain smatters your hair
your white shirt
your freckled face

In my dreams you run for miles
and never tire
your gasping breath puncturing
the silence of the cool morning.

I climb
past your palisades
and meet you in the moments
between sleep and waking

In my dreams you are
content. In my dreams, you
vanish and I never hear your voice again.

But I dream of you still.

Pulp stains the wrinkles
of your palms, seeds crushed
under your fingernails

I dream of you
fingertips slipped,
lost grip, my hands could not
hold you anymore

I woke, shivering
alone in the fractured
light of dawn

And time went on,
and I went on,
with a feeling of loss
that would not leave,
but I was still
me, without
you, as it was before.

By Nicole Q. Nguyen

Lamb

my reflection takes me by
surprise these days.
i don’t know when i had time
to age past seventeen.
she’d be pissed, you know,
that Promising Young Woman –
she was going to go to med school,
going to be somebody.
she was smart, mature for her age.
she was desperate to be enough.
she rages at me,
claws desperately behind my eyes,
her anger fire-bright.
is this it? she wails. is this all?
diapers and laundry and never enough sleep,
you sacrificed my future for this?
i try to hold her gently
– the astringent taste of adolescent
ambition singes, and I’d forgotten
the bitterness until now –
and hope that this girl,
selfish and irrational and hurting,
can forgive my happiness.
i watch her burn in my sons eyes
and i hope that funeral pyre
can be enough for either of us.

By J. Nider

My Mother Teaches Me How to Prepare Fish

I.
Yesterday I hand you slicked-back scale,
white underbelly, soft and ripening,
and you taught me how to hold a body
close, sheathe its cruelty, wrap it in
devotion. To hold the knife before
the cut, like a breath release and yes, there,
do you see?

II.
There is no room for loss here,
these memories of homeland
you’ve folded like fresh linen
and tossed into laundry machines
in square apartments, and now
they resemble washed-up denim.
You promised to never recall our
last life, the one where you were
the girl with the red mouth open
like a blood-moon. But we know
memories are only ghosts not yet
forgotten. That oath is still on the
cutting board, swollen and pink.
Still gasping. Still asking to be made
whole and kept.

III.
Draw breath before the
final cut. Prayers slit open like
underbelly. Recall its life, you say:
flash of scale, glorious sea, and
the kiss of sand. This creature
does not belong here, trapped
beneath my butcher’s knife. I
am trapped with it.
This country was never mine.
This water was never this
bright, never this cold.
How it devours.

IV.
Here, the tongues fold over
your closing mouth. Pa believes
words are the key to assimilation,
so we choke on syllables
between shifts. He does
not know language is a calculus:
the sum of its smallest parts.
You slice the head clean off.

By Bohan Gao