Special FeaturerbdSammie Downing, special feature, poetry

Sammie Downing: Am I a River Or a Woman

Special FeaturerbdSammie Downing, special feature, poetry
Sammie Downing: Am I a River Or a Woman
Tiko Giorgadze

Tiko Giorgadze

Am I a River Or a Woman

I do not own a gun or knives (if you don’t count the dull one by the kitchen sink) but I have discovered a bathtub on the other side of the world and if being young taught me nothing else, it’s this: the bath is full of daggers and yet you grow accustomed to the sight of rosy water filling the soft cavern between your thighs. If you can inherit memories you can inherit fathers bending over daughters with a grip on the tenterhooks of life, a rusty, flat-beer-flavor to his voice—you know, I love you the best. Memories that never even belonged to you imbed themselves in the trachea, the liver.

Make yourself a river—this is what the world has taught you. All around you earth is uplifted in a confluence of magma. Plates force themselves on one another in brutish competition for skyspace. Hand over hand against earth against rock against falling short against sinking under. This terror of movement forms a valley about your body.

So you cut yourself a space. A moment of quiet. A slice of privacy where you can deepen. What looks like stillness—like a flat plane of tender bubble lines—is only an illusion. In truth 22,500 cubic feet per second expel from within your depths. A millennia’s worth of sediment rides your swelling form. No one asked you to carry this sludge—you were born as transport. Quartz and sandstone and marble—each grain tumbles through your current—If you leave now, don’t ever come back. Whose voice is this? You are filled with snow still redolent of pine and cloud. Webs converge within you.

No matter how many baths I take the offal, the inheritance, can’t be flushed away. I go I go I go. Cutting yourself is for the impatient. I go to the bath to erode. To dissipate. Come to me and I will release you. It is a test: how long before you carve yourself to silt?

Am I the rock or am I the water? Or am I worn away

The poet Ed Roberson told Sammie Downing, “You only have one life and you only have one work.” Advice she's taken to heart–she's filed taxes in 7 U.S. States and now finds herself working on a cattle and deer station in the depths of New Zealand. Find her fiction at Entropy Mag, poetry at 3am Magazine and my blog at: www.herearelions.org. 

Special FeaturerbdDavid Boeving, special feature, poetry

David Boeving: A Crucifix Machine

David Boeving teaches rhetoric and writing at Eastern Michigan University and poetry and fiction at the Huron Valley Women’s Correctional Facility. David has published poems in Body Electric (Ann Arbor) and “‘News’ ‘Conference’ or Play Your T. Card” through Frog Island Press, and poems and photographs in NEAT, and Tongue Mag. He lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan with his loving partner and their two cats.

Special FeaturerbdDavid Boeving, special feature, poetry
David Boeving: A Crucifix Machine
Special FeaturerbdAshley Mares, special feature, poetry

Ashley Mares: Unclean Hands

Ashley Mares is the author of Maddening Creatures (Aldrich Press, forthcoming), The Deer Longs for Streams of Water (Flutter Press) A Dark, Breathing Heart (dancing girl press), and Killer (Ghost City Press, forthcoming). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Stirring, Whiskey Island, Sugar House Review, Glass Poetry Press, Prelude, PANK, and others. She is currently completing her J.D. in Monterey, Ca, where she lives with her husband. Read more of her poetry at ashleymarespoetry.wordpress.com and follow her @ash_mares2. 

Special FeaturerbdAshley Mares, special feature, poetry
Ashley Mares: Unclean Hands
Special FeaturerbdPhilip Schaefer, special feature, poetry

Philip Schaefer: Everyone Else’s Darkness

Philip Schaefer’s first collection of poems Bad Summon won the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize from the University of Utah Press and will be released Summer 2017. He is the author of three chapbooks, two of which were co-written with friend and poet Jeff Whitney. He won the 2016 Meridian Editor’s Prize in poetry and has work out or due out in Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Thrush Poetry Journal, Guernica, The Cincinnati Review, Salt Hill, Bat City Review, The Adroit Journal, Baltimore Review, and Passages North among others. He tends bar in Missoula, MT.

Special FeaturerbdPhilip Schaefer, special feature, poetry
Philip Schaefer: Everyone Else’s Darkness