Mother’s Day

By Madina Aria

I was a mother long before any of you learned how to speak.

Before your first lullabies, I was humming through pine needles and ocean tides.

Before your first homes, I was building mountains out of patience and time.

I remember when your cries first filled me.

Small voices rising into my skies like birds that had not yet learned fear.

Small feet running through my grass, believing the world would never end.

I have fed you without asking for gratitude.

I have clothed you in shade,

in rain,

in fields that bent toward your hunger.

I have held your smallest bones in my oldest hands.

And still, I watched you grow.

I watched you learn the language of distance,

of fences,

of forgetting.

I watched you turn from wandering children into builders of heavy things.

You return to me when you are grieving.

When your lungs need clean air.

When your feet remember they were made to touch the ground.

You praise my sunsets but rarely notice the scars.

You only call me sacred when your roads grow long and your cities grow tired.

You only name me beautiful when you are leaving me.

And still, I remain.

A mother does not stop loving,

simply because her children have learned how to wound what raised them.

And when you are done,

when your stories end where all stories end,

you return to me again.

Not as wanderers now, but as something quieter.

You are folded back into my soil without resistance.

You are held in my roots,

my darkness,

my quiet keeping.

I do not forget you.

I do not turn you away.

Even then, I make room for you,

my child.

Pain to Thee

By Nora Mudrick

A dream for some is being

able to embrace pain.

Some masochists who wipe

tears to feel okay;

Better yet, it is cool to like pain.

Collison on guard rails, backed by fangs

feels good on forearms, rather

ignored but praised.

I yearned to be like some,

branded in crossbow–brave

hunting The Familiar Crow

A dashing levin whose lightless beak

Picks into flesh,

Feasting on hardened hearts

From women

Brave and frightened,

Just like me.

Discussing pain is akin to a song

Whose beats are bones, ashes and ashes

Until you remember it’s all gone

Though my mind remembers;

for it breaths

A ribcage of memories strung

to pain like symmetry

I don’t yearn for the crow, for it

means death has come unto thee

So why praise such pain,

When you know the cause of loss…

Are only fickle, distraught pleasantries?

Sonnet: After Shihab-Nye

By Stanley Souza

Before you know the nature of time you must covet

what seems to flee your seeking, feel

one particular second as it ticks

into the next brilliant moment of opening.

Before you know homecoming, you must—

far from parochial paths the mind has tread—

become one with perdition; equate that definition

with what it means to be free.

Before you can gloss the meaning of

a certain well-honored face, you

must understand the grace of

being a guest in a stranger’s home,

learn how to eat the offering and

bless the host with a smile that is full.

What Comes Up But Doesn’t Come Down?

By Gemma Blackman

In 2009, my parents’ gray track home went into foreclosure.

My sister cut a big chunk out of my auburn hair.

My dad tells me “You’ll be five in our new house!”

Light streams through my pink curtains like flash gels,

It wasn’t until adulthood I realized my walls were white, not pink.

In my big back yard, my mean old dog wears ruts in the soil.

My mom tells me to play in my playhouse, but I’m scared of the spiderwebs.

My best friend and I sit on her turtle shaped sand box.

Ponderosa pine needles taste like citrus.

I braid them once they turn dry.

In the kitchen, my mom paints while listening to Fleet Foxes.

My purple racehorse propped on an easel.

My sister writes a letter to Mike Smith in crayon,

Congratulating Zenyatta for winning the Breeders Cup Classic.

In 2010, Zenyatta lost to Blame, ending her 19-0 streak.

My dad and my grandpa lost all their bets.

In the closet upstairs, I eye a pair of beaded kitten wedding heels.

My dad hangs bootcut Lucky’s jeans and stinky polyester tees.

My mom hangs long ratty henleys and expensive Free People dresses.

I sit in a basket of ties and scarves,

While my sister yells “Ready or not, here I come!”